This week there are two important enterprise technology conferences taking place. One – SAPPHIRE 2014 – will see an old guard enterprise tech giant attempt to show it is capable of adapting to a technology landscape increasingly dominated by the cloud and Big Data. The other – Hadoop Summit 2014 – will see dozens of start-ups born in this new world out to prove to cautious CIOs that their technologies and platforms are ready for enterprise-level workloads.
It’s an interesting juxtaposition. SAP is determined to join the ranks of the “cool” cloud and Big Data companies (Salesforce.com, Hortonworks, Amazon Web Services), while those cool companies are equally determined to join the “enterprise-grade” club dominated by IBM, Oracle and, yes, SAP.
We’re increasingly seeing companies from both groups partner up to achieve their respective goals. Recently, Microsoft announced a strategic alliance that will make the latter’s apps available on Windows and make it easier for users to analyze Salesforce data in Excel. Intel invested an eye-popping $740 million for an 18% stake in Hadoop start-up Cloudera in March. And SAP, Teradata and Microsoft continue to invest engineering manpower in their tight partnership with Hortonworks, Cloudera’s Hadoop rival.
The reason this is all coming to a head now is that enterprise CIOs and IT practitioners are both becoming more comfortable with new methods of computing beyond costly on-premise data centers and realizing that analyzing data to glean insights is critical to remaining competitive. Early results from Wikibon’s latest Big Data study show, for example, that 46% of respondents believe “Big Data is the new source of competitive advantage and is/will be fundamental to our business,” while 45% report that “Big Data Analytics is/will be an important complement to our existing data warehouse and business intelligence practice.” 57% of those surveyed that have already deployed Big Data technologies say they are using the public cloud for at least some of the related projects with 26% planning to use the cloud for Big Data analytics in the future.
The stakes are clearly high. For incumbents like SAP, they must adapt to this new world or resign themselves to stagnating revenue. For start-ups like Hortonworks, it’s time to show the world they are ready to take center stage in the enterprise.
Wikibon, SiliconANGLE and theCUBE will have full coverage of Hadoop Summit this week as we broadcast live from the floor of the San Jose Convention Center starting at 10:30am PT on Tuesday. We’ll have interviews with vendors, Big Data practitioners, analysts, journalists and more breaking down then news and putting all the announcements in context. We’ll also be keeping an eye on SAPPHIRE and what it means for the future of SAP.
Below find more information about this week’s coverage, which you can watch live athttp://siliconangle.tv/hadoop-summit-june-3-5-2014-san-jose-ca/.
