This is a personal note about a professional decision. You might not be interested. If you are, read on. I'll try to be brief.

I've had a very fulfilling two years as an independent analyst, succeeding beyond my expectations. I established (or continued) a respected brand, gathered several thousand twitter followers, drew 80,000 blog views in 18 months, wrote a number of well-regarded papers, keynoted events, conducted webinars and interviews, and was consulted by the largest companies in our industry as well as emerging, exciting smaller ones. I collaborated with other independents and made new friends everywhere. Financially, I had the two best years of my career. Valley View Ventures, my business agent, has made it smooth and painless on every side, and Fred Abbott is a great friend, mentor and business partner.

Whew. All that said, it surprises a lot of my friends and colleagues that I have decided to accept a position as a Vice President in Research for Gartner effective January 3, 2011. So: Why? Because for the next few years it will be the best seat in the house for the most dramatic changes that our business has seen in decades.

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Over the past two years, Cloudera has demonstrated the power of surrounding emerging open source software with support services, expertise and its own IP. The firm has  racked up over 30 customers since its founding in late 2008, and emerged as the leading source of Apache Hadoop. Cloudera's recent C round of financing brought its funding to $36 million, and it has been investing aggressively, with 45 employees, a very visible voice on the Big Data circuit and a stellar, experienced leadership team. It evangelizes through training, thought leadership, and increasingly through a growing sales and marketing team.

One indicator of Cloudera's precocity has been its prioritization of key alliances - higher than many firms its size - and that strategy is likely to have a big payoff if the partnerships are well executed and bring the marketplace momentum and the value they promise to fruition. Two key recent announcements involved Membase and Informatica. I've discussed the latter in another post - here I'll talk about why the Membase deal makes so much sense.

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Cloudera's continuing focus on the implications of explosive data growth has led it to another key partnership, this time with Informatica. Connecting to the dominant player in data integration and data quality expands the opportunity for Cloudera dramatically; it enables the de facto commercial Hadoop leader to find new ways to empower the "silent majority" of data. The majority of data is outside; not just outside enterprise data warehouses, but outside RDBMS instances entirely. Why? Because it doesn't need all the management features database management software provides - it doesn't get updated regularly, for example. In fact, it may not be used very often at all, though it does need to be persisted for a variety of reasons. I recently mentioned Cloudera's success of late; it's going to be challenged by some big players in 2011, notably IBM, whose recent focus on Hadoop has been remarkably nimble. So these deals matter. A lot. The Data Management function is being refactored before our eyes; both these vendors will play in its future.

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Microsoft chose a user group meeting, Professional Association for SQL Server (PASS), for the rollout of its long-awaited, and late, SQL Server 2008 R2 Parallel Data Warehouse (note, yet again, how foolish it is for vendors to trap themselves with dates in product names.) PDW is late to market; there are other MPP DBMS players there already, and Microsoft is behind in functionality compared to some of them. Some of the most eagerly--awaited features are evidently not slated for the first release. It's also far behind its originally planned ship date following the acquisition of DatAllegro in 2008.

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It was hard to decide where to look first in Las Vegas this year at IBM's flagship information management event. Coming as it did on the heels of a massive, sprawling Oracle Open World, it was also overwhelming, but distinguished itself immediately by its focus. Whereas Oracle has smashed together hardware systems, apps, middleware, java and development, systems management and database into a bewildering multi-site show, IBM continues to run separate events for Websphere, Rational, Tivoli, and Lotus. No single IBM event trumpets "we're the biggest," and they don't take over the towns they're in; the content seems a bit more manageable. And as an attendee who hopes to get a broad view, I'm happy with that. However, as I'll discuss below, Oracle is winning the messaging war nonetheless.

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