Ex-Vertica CEO: Hadoop Is Pulling The Rug From Under The Database Industry

Summary: Venture capitalist Chris Lynch has disrupted the database industry before as CEO of Vertica Systems, but now he’s watching Hadoop take it to the next level. Here are his thoughts on the challenges legacy vendors face and who’s positioned to ride the big data wave.

Chris Lynch has been watching the database industry closely for decades as both the CEO of Vertica Systems and now as a partner with Boston-based venture capital firm Atlas Venture. And, as he told us on this week’s Structure Show podcast, the database industry is under some serious fire from open source technologies like Hadoop.

Here are some highlights from an insightful 15-minute conversation that you’ll probably want to hear in its entirety.

“We’re starting to see the finical impact that Hadoop can have on the ecosystem of database vendors,” he said, referring to the latest earnings numbers from analytic-database pioneer Teradata.