Big Data Right Now: Five Trendy Open Source Technologies

Big Data is on every CIO’s mind this quarter, and for good reason. Companies will have spent $4.3 billion on Big Data technologies by the end of 2012. Big Data is presently synonymous with technologies like Hadoop, and the “NoSQL” class of databases including Mongo (document stores) and Cassandra (key-values).

What you’re seeing right now is only the tip of a gigantic iceberg. Big Data is presently synonymous with technologies like Hadoop, and the “NoSQL” class of databases including Mongo (document stores) and Cassandra (key-values).  Today it’s possible to stream real-time analytics with ease. Spinning clusters up and down is a (relative) cinch, accomplished in 20 minutes or less. We have table stakes.

But there are new, untapped advantages and non-trivially large opportunities beyond these usual suspects. Did you know that there are over 250K viable open source technologies on the market today? Innovation is all around us. The increasing complexity of systems, in fact, looks something like this...