Why Proprietary Big Data Technologies Have No Hope Of Competing With Hadoop

Big Data is a big market, but most of the value will be captured by users, not vendors.

Big Data is not new. For decades companies have been leveraging massive data warehouses and other proprietary Big Data tools to optimize business processes, improve customer targeting and more. That, however, was the problem: proprietary. Today Big Data is so big precisely because it's so open: Hadoop, NoSQL databases and all other leading Big Data technologies are open source. Without exception.

As such, for the first time enterprise users of Big Data technology are the primary winners in the market, rather than the vendors who serve them. That's the open source effect on Big Data, and it's only going to accelerate over time.

Hadoop's Unfair Advantage

Though just one of many winning open-source projects, Hadoop is perhaps the poster child for Big Data technology. While Hadoop enables a new class of analytics, arguably it's earliest innovation was to dramatically lower the cost of storing and analyzing huge quantities of data.