Cloudera and MongoDB recently announced a strategic partnership designed to allow customers to take advantage of Cloudera’s Hadoop distribution and MongoDB’s NoSQL platform. Details of the partnership remain scant although we do know that both companies are working on enhancing the current version of the MongoDB connector for Hadoop, which is certified to run on Cloudera Enterprise 5. The MongoDB Connector for Hadoop “is a plugin for Hadoop that provides the ability to use MongoDB as an input source and/or an output destination.” In other words, the MongoDB Connector for Hadoop enables Hadoop users to output data to MongoDB and conversely, to receive MongoDB within a Hadoop environment. Cloudera’s Chief Strategy Officer Mike Olsen commented on the partnership by noting:
Volume, variety and velocity all strain traditional operational databases, calling for a fundamental reconsideration of how companies store and process data. A Hadoop-powered enterprise data hub is an alternative center for data storage and analytics, and together with MongoDB, we empower companies to keep all of their data in full fidelity and at minimal cost, in order to power the data needs of all connected applications and IT infrastructure.
One direction for the partnership consists of the delivery of a turnkey Big Data solution with the analytic capabilities to mine both structured and unstructured data. From a product development standpoint, the obvious question concerns how much both vendors will invest in querying, analytic and predictive modeling capabilities that span both Hadoop and NoSQL. That said, the Big Data and cloud landscape has witnessed a proliferation of partnerships that lead to amalgamations of heterogeneous technology components within a larger institutional framework, but rarely result in genuine innovation and breakthrough technologies as noted in IBM’s Acquisition of Cloudant and The Walmart Effect In Tech. All this is to say that while the Cloudera-MongoDB partnership holds tremendous, even disruptive promise for the Big Data industry, partnerships represent a markedly prevalent fashion in contemporary tech based on the principles of collage and montage that sometimes result in innovation and disruptive technology platforms, but all too often deliver varied combinations of elemental technologies that disappoint in proportion to the capital and human talent brought together by the collaboration in question. Cloudera’s Mike Olsen will present further details regarding the partnership in his keynote address at MongoDB World in NYC on June 24.
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