August 3rd, 2011 — Data management
Continuing my recent exploration of Indeed.com’s job posting trends and data I have recently been taking a look at which organizations (excluding recruitment firms) are hiring Hadoop and MapReduce skills. The results are pretty interesting.
When it comes to who is hiring Hadoop skills, the answer, put simply, is Amazon, or more generally new media:
Source: Indeed.com Correct as of August 2, 2011
This is indicative of the early stage of adoption, and perhaps reflects the fact that many new media Hadoop adopters have chosen to self-support rather than turn to the Hadoop support providers/distributors.
It is no surprise to see those vendors also listed as they look to staff up to meet the expected levels of enterprise adoption (and it is worth noting that Amazon could also be included in the vendors category, given its Elastic MapReduce service).
Fascinating to see that of the vendors, VMware currently has the most job postings on Indeed.com referencing Hadoop, while Microsoft also makes an appearance.
Meanwhile the appearance of Northrop Grumman and Sears Holdings on this list indicates the potential for adoption in more traditional data management adopters, such as government and retail.
It is interesting to compare the results for Hadoop job postings with those mentioning Teradata, which shows a much more varied selection of retail, health, telecoms, and financial services providers, as well as systems integrators, government contractors, new media and vendors.
It is also interesting to compare Hadoop-related bog postings with those specifying MapReduce skills. There are a lot less of them, for a start, and while new media companies are well-represented, there is much greater interest from government contractors.
Source: Indeed.com Correct as of August 2, 2011
July 28th, 2011 — Data management, M&A
When I was messing around with Indeed.com job trends the other day I was struck by an interesting trend relating to the five recent major M&A deals involving analytic database vendors: Netezza, Sybase, Greenplum, Vertica and Aster Data.
The trends aren’t immediately obvious from that chart, but if we break them out individually and add a black dot to indicate the approximate date of the acquisition announcement it all becomes clear.
(Note: scale varies from chart to chart)
While the acquisitions have accelerated job postings for all acquired analytic databases, Greenplum has clearly been the biggest beneficiary. Indeed.com’s data also explains why this might be: EMC/Greenplum is responsible for over 50% of the current Greenplum-related job postings on the site (excluding recruiter postings).
Greenplum had 140 employees when it was acquired in July 2010. Based on the hiring growth illustrated above, EMC’s Data Computing Products Division is set to reach 650 by the end of the year.
Netezza started with a much larger base, but IBM is expected to increase headcount at Netezza from 500 in September 2010 to a target of 800 by year-end. Thanks, no doubt, to Netezza’s larger installed base, IBM is responsible for just 7.7% of Netezza job postings.
This highlights something we recently noted in a 451 Group M&A Insight report: in order to make a considerable dent in the dominance of the big four, any acquiring company will not only have to buy a data-warehousing player but also invest in its growth.
While Vertica and Aster Data are both heading in the right direction, we believe that HP and Teradata will have to accelerate their investment in the Vertica subsidiary and the new Aster Data ‘center of excellence’ respectively.
HP recently told us headcount has grown about 40% since the acquisition (it wasn’t being specific, but Vertica reported 100 employees in January). HP/Vertica is currently responsible for 13.9% for Vertica-related job postings on Indeed.com
We had speculated that Teradata would need to similarly boost the headcount at Aster Data beyond the estimated 100 employees. Teradata/Aster Data is responsible for 24% of job postings for Aster Data.
But what of Sybase? While Sybase IQ also has a larger installed base, SAP/Sybase are responsible for just 6.4% of the Sybase IQ-related job postings on Indeed.com. The Sybase IQ chart illustrates some common sense investment advice: the value of your investment can go down as well as up.
July 26th, 2011 — Data management
Recently there have been a spate of postings regarding job trends for distributed data management technologies including Hadoop and the various NoSQL databases.
One thing you rarely see on these job trends charts is comparison with an incumbent technology, for context. There’s a reason for that, as this comparison of database-related jobs from Indeed.com illustrates:
Although there has been a recent increase in job postings related to Hadoop and MongoDB, both are dwarfed, in absolute terms, by the number of job postings involving SQL Server and MySQL.
So why all the fuss about Hadoop and NoSQL, from a corporate perspective? This chart, showing the relative growth for the same data management technologies, says it all:
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