I took notes on Shaun Connolly’s “Hortonworks State of the Union and Vision for Apache Hadoop in 2013.”
Unless you are an open source/Hadoop innocent, you aren’t going to gain much new information from the webinar.
But there is another reason for watching the webinar.
That is the strategy Hortonworks is pursuing in developing the Hadoop ecosystem.
Shaun refers to it in various ways (warning, some paraphrasing): “Investing in making Hadoop work with existing infrastructure,” add Hadoop to (not replace) traditional data architectures, “customers don’t want more data silos.”
Rather than a rip-and-replace technology, Hortonworks is building a Hadoop ecosystem that interacts with and compliments existing data architectures.
Think about that for a moment.
Works with existing data architectures.
Which means everyone from ordinary users to power users and sysadmins, can work from what they know and gain the benefits of a Hadoop ecosystem.
True enough, over time some (all?) of their traditional data architectures may become more Hadoop based but that will be a gradual process.
In the meantime, the benefits of Hadoop will be made manifest in the context of familiar tooling.
When a familiar tool runs faster, acquires new capabilities, user’s notice the change along with the lack of a learning curve.
Watch the webinar for the strategy and think about how to apply it to your favorite semantic technology.