February 6, 2012
Comments on the 2012 Forrester Wave: Enterprise Hadoop Solutions
Forrester has released its Q1 2012 Forrester Wave: Enterprise Hadoop Solutions. (Googling turns up a direct link, but in case that doesn’t prove stable, here also is a registration-required link from IBM’s Conor O’Mahony.) My comments include:
- The Forrester Wave’s relative vendor rankings are meaningless, in that the document compares apples, peaches, almonds, and peanuts. Apparently, it covers any vendor that includes a distribution of Apache Hadoop MapReduce into something it offers, and that offered at least two (not necessarily full production) references for same.
- The Forrester Wave for “enterprise Hadoop” contradicts itself on the subject of Hortonworks.
- The Forrester Wave for “enterprise Hadoop” is correct when it says “Hortonworks … has Hadoop training and professional services offerings that are still embryonic.”
- Peculiarly, the Forrester Wave for “enterprise Hadoop” also says “Hortonworks offers an impressive Hadoop professional services portfolio”. Hortonworks will likely win one or more nice partnership deals with vendors in adjacent fields, but even so its professional services capabilities are … well, a good word might be “embryonic”.
- Forrester Waves always seem to have weird implicit definitions of “data warehousing”. This one is no exception.
- Forrester gave top marks in “Functionality” to 11 of 13 “enterprise Hadoop” vendors. This seems odd.
- I don’t know why MapR, which doesn’t like HDFS (Hadoop Distributed File System), got top marks in “Subproject integration”.
- Forrester gave top marks in “Storage” to Datameer. It also gave higher marks to MapR than to EMC Greenplum, even though EMC Greenplum’s technology is a superset of MapR’s. Very strange. (Edit: Actually, as per a comment below, there is some uncertainty about the EMC/MapR relationship.)
- Forrester gave higher marks in “Acceleration and optimization” to Hortonworks than to Cloudera and IBM, and higher marks yet to Pentaho. Very odd.
- I’m not sure what Forrester is calling a “Distributed EDW file store connector”, but it sounds like something that Cloudera has provided via partnership to a number of analytic DBMS vendors.
- Forrester’s “Strategy” rankings seem to correlate to a metric of “We’re a large enough vendor to go in N directions at once”, for various values of N.
- Forrester is correct to rank Cloudera’s “Adoption” as being stronger than EMC/Greenplum’s or MapR’s. But Hortonworks’ strong mark for “Adoption” baffles me.
Categories: Cloudera, Data warehousing, EMC, Greenplum, Hadoop, Hortonworks, MapR, MapReduce, Pentaho
Subscribe to our complete feed!
Comments
11 Responses to “Comments on the 2012 Forrester Wave: Enterprise Hadoop Solutions”
Leave a Reply
Curt,
It looks like EMC has recently changed strategy around their “Greenplum HD”.
HD is now a variant of ASF Hadoop, of both the “community” and “enterprise” variety (it was before based on MapR M3/5). Their MapR offering is now referred to as “Greenplum MR”.
This change in strategy seems to coincide with the release of their Isilon connectors (which use ASF Hadoop, as well). Not good signs for MapR as a company, if their biggest strategic partner has built directly competitive offerings.
I agree that some other portions of the Forrester report are confusing – thanks for parsing this stuff for us.
Couldn’t agree more. I was a little baffled when I first saw the report , too. I would hate to be HStreaming, which ends up looking like a poor product despite that it aims to solve an entirely different problem than what anyone else on the list does.
The overall ranking is also 37.5% based on the single line item “Strategic Direction” which seems to be entirely subjective.
pretty sloppy work honestly, expect better of Forrester
[…] that didn’t like how their products were assessed, and database industry analyst Curt Monash says the report “compares apples, peaches, almonds, and peanuts.” I thought the same thing when I saw a copy of the report last week. They all focus on Hadoop, but […]
In my opinion, it is also unfair to compair Hadoop distributions with hosted services/products like the various AWS offerings.
The report also gives 5/5 to Amazon for professional services. From what I understand. that’s not something they offer at all! Amazon offers a hosted product (Elastic MapReduce) and support backing the product.
That is awesome. Based on some of my PS experiences I guess a case could be made…
“The report also gives 5/5 to Amazon for professional services. From what I understand. that’s not something they offer at all! “
[…] wasn’t the only one to be dubious about Forrester Research’s Hadoop taxonomy (or lack thereof). GigaOm’s Derrick Harris was as well, and offered a much superior approach […]
You are absolutely correct. I am very much aware of Hadoop and personally implemented while doing technology selection process for large financial company. Forrester forgot to mention Oracle’s Bigdata offering which is based on Clouder’s Hadoop and MapR. It provides the capability of complete integration out of the box with Infiniband capability. There are things every client looks for it and those are:
1. Integrated Stack.
2. Time to Market.
3. Risk Mitigation.
Oracle provides all of them along with it’s database strong market hold.
Oracle is offering something based on MapR? Are you sure? I haven’t heard of that, and if Google is to be believed, neither have many other people.
Curt,
I believe Goutam may have mis-spoken, conflating the new Oracle R Enterprise analytics offering from Oracle with MapR. Just a guess, but… too many obscure names/acronyms floating around out there.
[…] As far as the technical accuracy of the Wave is concerned, Curt Monash did a pretty thorough job of pointing out a number of technical aspects, and Derrick Harris from GigaOM offered an interesting taxonomy of Hadoop – saving me the […]