The Data Day, A few days: June 21-30 2014

Funding for MapR and Couchbase. And more

And that’s the data day, today.

The Data Day, A few days: May 3-8 2014

Teradata and Tableau report Q1 results

And that’s the data day, today.

The Data Day, A few days: February 22-28 2014

451 Research Data Platforms and Analytics – 2014 Research Agenda. And more

And that’s the data day, today.

Visualizing the $1bn+ VC investment in Hadoop and NoSQL

Cumulative VC funding for Hadoop and NoSQL vendors broke through the $1bn barrier in 2013, according a Spotlight report published by 451 Research, based on data provided by The 451 M&A KnowledgeBase.

The data indicates that there was a substantial increase in funding in 2013 ($530.5m, not including RethinkDB’s $8m announced yesterday) compared to 2012 ($190.9m), thanks to major rounds for the likes of MongoDB, Pivotal, Hortonworks and DataStax.

The report includes a visualization created by 451’s Director of Data Strategy and Solutions, Barbara Peng, that illustrates the connections between the various investors and the NoSQL and Hadoop vendors in which they have invested.

A snapshot of the visualization is shown below but the the original is interactive, enabling 451 Research clients to drag the various elements around for greater emphasis, as well as isolate the NoSQL or Hadoop categories.

vc-firms

451 Research clients can also scroll over the blue circles to see the total amount of funding raised by the individual Hadoop and NoSQL vendors, and scroll over the smaller orange circles to see which investors have backed which companies.

The sample set was limited to 16 vendors for visual clarity, but the six Hadoop and 10 NoSQL providers cited account for more than 87% of funding to date (with Pivotal representing the vast majority of the remaining 13%).

This visualization illustrates that investment in Hadoop and NoSQL providers comes from a relatively small group of VC firms (52 to be specific, excluding individual seed investors), resulting in a relatively tightly clustered graph.

However, the visualization also enables us to put to the test the recent blog post by MarkLogic’s Adam Fowler in which he stated:

“Just look at the number of investors who are investing in multiple NoSQL companies. They’re hedging their bets because they’re not sure themselves which businesses will survive.”

In fact investment in multiple Hadoop and NoSQL vendors is relatively rare. Only 11 out of the 52 VC firms have invested in more than one Hadoop and/or NoSQL vendor, with seven of those picking one Hadoop vendor and one NoSQL provider. Less hedging their bets as picking a winner in each category.

Of the remaining four investment shops, two have invested in one Hadoop distributor, one NoSQL specialist and one Hadoop-as-a-service provider (MapR, DataStax and Qubole for Lightspeed Venture Partners; Cloudera, Couchbase and Altiscale for Accel Partners), while In-Q-Tel has invested in one Hadoop supplier, one NoSQL vendor and one NoSQL-as-a-service provider (Cloudera, MongoDB and Cloudant).

Only Sequoia Capital has invested in multiple NoSQL vendors (as well as Hadoop-as-a-service provider Altiscale) having invested in MongoDB, DataStax and – hold onto your hats, irony fans – MarkLogic. It should be noted however that Sequoia has not invested in DataStax since its series A round in late 2010.

The full report, Venture funding for Hadoop and NoSQL vendors tops $1bn is available now to 451 Research clients and also includes our perspective on when combined Hadoop and NoSQL revenue might begin to exceed combined Hadoop and NoSQL VC funding, as well as the potential for M&A and IPO activity in 2014.

The Data Day, A few days: November 9-14 2013

Total Data Integration. PostgreSQL on RDS. And more

And that’s the data day, today.

The Data Day, A few days: October 12-18 2013

Apache Hadoop 2 goes GA. Teradata cuts guidance. And more

And that’s the data day, today.

7 Hadoop questions. Q4: alternative file systems

Which is your preferred Hadoop file system? The obvious answer is likely to be the Hadoop Distributed File System itself, although in recent years we’ve seen an increasing number of vendors pitching their own file system technologies as potential alternatives to HDFS. That’s why the use of alternative file systems is one of the primary questions being asked in the 451 Research 2013 Hadoop survey.

hadoop-elephant

The limitations of HDFS are well-publicised, and it is no surprise that many vendors see an opportunity to pitch their existing files system technologies as alternatives to HDFS.

There is now a large number of HDFS alternatives to choose from, including: Cleversafe Dispersed Storage Network, DataStax CassandraFS, EMC Isilon OneFS, IBM GPFS, InkTank Ceph, MapR NFS, Quantcast QFS, Red Hat Storage (GlusterFS), and Symantec Veritas CFS.

Our research indicates that adoption of alternatives to HDFS is limited at this stage and early efforts, such as Appistry’s CloudIQ Storage Hadoop Edition, have come and gone.

However, as adoption of Hadoop grows into more mainstream enterprises, we increasingly see interest in some of these HDFS alternatives, particularly in relation to attempts to reduce duplication of effort with regards to file system management and maintenance.

survey

The early responses to our Hadoop survey are therefore interesting: MapR NFS has scored highest in terms of adoption so far, but there is interest across the board (especially Red Hat Storage, CassandraFS, GPFS, OneFS and Ceph). By and large though, its true to say that most respondents have not considered, tested or adopted an alternative file system to date.

To give your view on this and other questions related to the adoption of Hadoop, please take our 451 Research 2013 Hadoop survey.

The Data Day, A few days: August 8-14 2013

DBaaS drives next-generation database growth. CSC acquires Infochimps. And more

And that’s the data day, today.

The Data Day, A few days: July 24-31 2013

Next-Gen DB market sizing. Total Data Integration. And more.

And that’s the data day, today.

The Data Day, A few days: July 18-23 2013

DataStax raises $45m. Actian’s post-acquisition binge strategy. And more

And that’s the data day, today.