The Coming Majority: Mainstream Adoption and Entrepreneurship by James Locus.
From the post:
Small companies, big data.
Big data is sometimes at odds with the business-savvy entrepreneur who wants to exploit its full potential. In essence, the business potential of big data is the massive (but promising) elephant in the room that remains invisible because the available talent necessary to take full advantage of the technology is difficult to obtain.
Inventing new technology for the platform is critical, but so too is making it easier to use.
The future of big data may not be a technological breakthrough by a select core of contributing engineers, but rather a platform that allows common, non-PhD holding entrepreneurs and developers to innovate. Some incredible progress has been made in Apache Hadoop with Hortonworks’ HDP (Hortonworks Data Platform) in minimizing the installation process required for full implementation. Further, the improved MapReduce v2 framework also greatly lowers the risk of adoption for businesses by expressly creating features designed to increase efficiency and usability (e.g. backward and forward compatibility). Finally, with HCatalog, the platform is opened up to integrate with new and existing enterprise applications.
What kinds of opportunities lie ahead when more barriers are eliminated?
You really do need a local installation of Hadoop for experimenting.
But at the same time, having a minimal cloud account where you can whistle up some serious computing power isn’t a bad idea either.
That would make an interesting “back to school” or “holiday present for your favorite geek” sort of present. A “gift certificate” for so many hours/cycles a month on a cloud platform.
BTW, what projects would you undertake if barriers of access and capacity were diminished if not removed?