Early adopters want tools, but the bulk of the market wants products. Big data doesn’t change this principle. It is natural that in the early stages the raw power of tools should be celebrated. That explains the justified excitement about the potential of Hadoop and its surrounding ecosystem. But for the world to embrace big data, we need products.
The question is what kind of products will be built? Who will they be designed to serve? How well will they fit? To build a product, you must make choices about what is configurable and what is not. Where and how you allow degrees of freedom is crucial to the fit of the product to your intended market segments.
The ideal of course is to be able to deliver a product and a set of configurations that makes it work just like the customer wants. If you get this right you can serve many different markets by offering different configurations.
In its announcement on 2/18, MapR made a strong statement about its vision of the right product to support use of big data in the business world. MapR’s product is its platform, a set of integrated technologies that can be configured to meet various needs. MapR’s platform supports development, so in that sense, it can be thought of as a tool, but it also integrates a variety of technologies in a way that implies the kind of applications needed to make big data valuable. In this way, MapR’s platform is a product. Here’s what they offer:
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