Open source platforms for 'Big Data'

Open-source source platforms for big data have exploded in popularity. And in the past few months, it seems like nearly everyone is feeling the fallout.Cost, flexibility and the availability of trained personnel are major reasons for the open-source boom. Hadoop, R and NoSQL are now the supporting pillars of many enterprises' big data strategies, whether they involve managing unstructured data or performing complex statistical analyses on it."

[According to James Kobielus] "As the footprint of closed-source software shrinks in many data/analytics environments, many incumbent vendors will evolve their business models toward open-source approaches," he wrote, "and also ramp up professional services and systems integration to assist customers in their moves towards open-source, cloud-oriented analytics, much of it focused on Hadoop and R.

"Forrester regards Hadoop, for example, as the nucleus of the next-generation enterprise data warehouse (EDW) in the cloud, and R as a key codebase in the coming wave of integrated big data development tools. We also expect various open-source NoSQL databases and tools to coalesce into rich alternatives to closed-source content analytics offerings."