Yahoo’s former CTO talks about Hadoop

Raymie Stata has been a champion of Hadoop since its early days, helping to bring the technology into Yahoo and then drive its usage across the company. Now, Stata is co-founder and CEO of Altiscale, a startup offering Hadoop as a service to companies fed up with managing their own big data infrastructure. He came on the Structure Show podcast this week to discuss why Hadoop matters, where it’s headed, and whether it really matters where a company’s engineers cut their teeth.

Listen up, folks: You may be running Hadoop wrong. Hadoop is open-source software for scalable, distributed computing. It has become the “operating system for big data,” but that doesn’t mean your company needs to run its own distribution, said Altiscale chief executive Raymie Stata onstage at VentureBeat’s DataBeat conference. Altiscale is a cloud service built specifically to run the open-source software for other companies. Its idea is pretty simple: All businesses should be able to use Hadoop to collect, store, query, and organize their data as efficiently as any tech titan. Why is Hadoop so important, you might ask? Because it’s cheap, flexible, and powerful compared to other methods of data storage, including many relational database management systems.