Yahoo is considering to turn Hadoop into a business, as reported by the Wall Street Journal. Ovum’s Tony Baer has a more detailed analysis at his blog in Yahoo to Hadoop: Show me the Money.
In the long run, we also expect IBM to make a stab at Hadoop and related technologies by extending its InfoSphere offerings -– it can see Cloudera-Informatica and Cloudera-MicroStrategy raise it one with its own InfoSphere DataStage and Cognos offerings, before it even talks about partnerships. Today we saw a shot from left field – Yahoo which invented the technology – is now saying it might spin off its Hadoop business to go up against Cloudera, and potentially IBM. In a way, its closing the doors after the horses left the barn as the creator of Hadoop is now part of Cloudera.
For Yahoo, this would clearly be a shot out of its comfort zone, as it is not a tools company. But it is hungry for monetizing its intellectual property, even if that property has already been open sourced. It’s redolent of Sun striving to monetize Java and we all know how that went. Obviously this will be an uphill battle for Yahoo, but at least this would be a spinoff so hopefully there won’t be distractions from the mother ship. Given Yahoo’s fortunes, we shouldn’t be surprised that they are now looking to maximize what they can get out of the family jewels.
More commercial offerings in NoSQL can only be a good thing.