August 8th, 2012 — Data management
Who loves Hadoop? Who doesn’t?
And that’s the Data Day, today.
May 8th, 2012 — Data management
April 25th, 2012 — Data management
March 13th, 2012 — Mobile
We’ve been spending a good deal of time lately talking to vendors looking to deliver ‘Dropbox-for-the-enterprise’ alternatives. By this, providers generally mean that they enable users to sync and share their files across desktops and devices, but in a way that is palatable to corporate IT departments. I’d say we really started to see this activity in earnest about a year ago, when Box started getting serious about the enterprise market and I began to get a lot of briefing requests from the likes of Accellion, Egnyte and others about their enterprise file sharing and sync offerings. Things really started heating up later in 2011, as we saw VMWare announce its Dropbox-for-the-enterprise in August, Citrix acquire ShareFile in October; open source play ownCloud set sail in December and we recently initiated coverage on another startup, Germany-based TeamDrive.
These are only a few of the movements in this emerging market. Things will only become more active in 2012. Perhaps one of the more notable features is the broad background of players entering this space – we see vendors from virtualization, security, storage, content management and mobiltity sectors all vying for attention. This is likely to cause an awful lot of noise, and consfusion.
Compounding the matter is that everyone in this market seems to be struggling with what exactly to call it. “Enterprise-grade Dropbox” neatly encapsulates it, but it’s not really a viable way to refer to a market segment. We put out a report on ‘cloud file sharing’ late in 2011, but that really is a broader focus and doesn’t really capture what is important and different about this segment in particular. Dropbox is a obviously a cloud service and many of the players that want to offer Dropbox-like services are as well. But while the cloud certainly *can* be enabling an enabling technology, it doesn’t have to be. Indeed, a number of players, such as Accellion, Egnyte, GroupLogic, ownCloud, Oxygen Cloud and, presumably, VMWare when it gets to it, are offering private-cloud or on-premises approaches for file sharing and sync.
So we’ve settled on Mobile File Sharing and Sync Platforms as the way that we are going to refer to this segment, at least for now. The mobility part of this, as opposed to cloud, is what is really new and disruptive. That is what drives the need for sync and native apps for specific device types. We also think it is important to identify these emerging products, including Dropbox itself, as ‘platforms’ since we suspect there will be ample opportunity moving forward for customization and plug-ins to these tools. We are already seeing some of these in the areas of security, content management and collaboration for Dropbox specifically.
Calling a set of Dropbox-like capabilities a platform is interesting, though we can also flip the conversation on its head and wonder whether sync is really a feature, as others are doing. The answer may well be that it is both. In the enterprise, it certainly makes sense as a feature of content management, collaboration and even storage offerings, since business content is generally part of broader business processes and often needs to be retained for compliance reasons. IT also wants to get the most out of existing investments. We are already seeing sync as a feature from the likes of OpenText and Huddle, and this is arguably Box’s approach as well. We also have partnerships between the likes of Oxygen Cloud and EMC, to layer a sync service on top of storage infrastructure.
We take a more extensive look at the market for Mobile File Sharing and Sync Platforms in a recent report (login required) for 451 clients. This report looks at user and IT requirements and provides more detail on the enterprise players we’ve begun to track. How this market plays out exactly over time remains to be seen, but we think it has the potential to be extremely disruptive. For that reason it’s a space we’ll continue to watch closely, and from multiple vantage points.
January 24th, 2012 — Data management
January 13th, 2012 — Data management
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
March 15th, 2010 — Data management
One of the essential problems with the covering the NoSQL movement is that it describes not what the associated databases are, but what they are not (and doesn’t even do that very well since SQL itself is in many cases orthogonal to the problem the databases are designed to solve).
It is interesting to see fellow analyst Curt Monash facing the same problem. As he notes, while there seems to be a common theme that “NoSQL is Foo without joins and transactions,” no one has adequately defined what “Foo” is.
Curt has proposed HVSP (High-Volume Simple Processing) as an alternative to NoSQL, and while I’m not jumping on the bandwagon just yet, it does pass the Ronseal test (it does what it says on the tin), and it also matches my view of what defines these distributed data store technologies.
Some observations:
I agree with Curt’s view that object-oriented and XML databases should not be considered part of this new breed of distributed data store technologies. There is a danger that NoSQL simply comes to mean non-relational.
I also agree that MapReduce and Hadoop should not be considered part of this category of data management technologies (which is somewhat ironic since if there is any technology for which the terms NoSQL or Not Only SQL are applicable, it is MapReduce).
The vendors associated with the NoSQL movement (Basho, Couchio and MongoDB) are in a problematic position. While they are benefiting from, and to some extent encouraging, interest in NoSQL, the overall term masks their individual benefits. My sense is they will look to move away from it sooner rather than later.
Memcached is not a key value store. It is a cache. Hence the name.
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There are numerous categorizations of the various NoSQL technologies available on the Internet. Without wishing to add yet another to the mix, I have created another one – more for my benefit than anything else.
It includes a list of users for the various projects (where available), and also some sense of whether the various projects fit into CAP Theorem, an understanding of which is, to my mind, essential for understanding how and why the NoSQL/HVSP movement has emerged (look out for more on CAP Theorem in a follow-up post on alternatives to NoSQL).
Here’s my take, for those that are interested. As you can see there’s a graph database-shaped whole in my knowledge. I’m hoping to fill that sooner rather than later.
By the way, our Spotlight report introducing The 451 Group’s formal coverage of NoSQL databases will be available here imminently.
Update: VMware has announced that it has hired Redis creator Salvatore Sanfilippo, and is taking on the Redis key value store project. The image below has been updated to reflect that, as well as the launch of NorthScale’s Membase.
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