Big data is (very) big business but what's driving the trend? After a stellar 340 percent increase over its own Q1 sales numbers, big data analytics provider Pentaho is offering up some insights.
According to Pentaho's own data, a full 70 percent of its new customers are deploying on Hadoop, with the remaining new customers split evenly between NoSQL databases (MongoDB and Cassandra) and analytic databases (e.g. Greenplum and Veretica).
Pentaho played its hand in the big data game very well, releasing some of its technology to the open source community under the Apache License. That likely resulted in much more adoption in the broader developer community and brought the number of downloads for Pentaho's big data technology to more than 65,000 over the last few months.
So what else is driving interest in big data analytics?
New Uses: Pentaho also saw a "growing spectrum" of companies getting involved with big data - spanning industries including digital media, mobile apps, gaming, healthcare, finance and more - and creating analytics products to understand customer behavior, lead conversion, security threat patterns and even supply chain optimization.
More Tools: One of the obstacles in big data analytics optimization has been the availability of tools which simplify complex scripting have emerged too, including Pentaho's own visual design studio which creates MapReduce jobs without coding and provides an engine to execute them in Hadoop.