In organizations and businesses of all sizes, the Big Data trend–sorting and sifting large data sets with new tools in pursuit of surfacing meaningful angles on stored information–is on the rise. As we’ve noted, the Hadoop project has been one of the big drivers of this trend. It has also given rise to commercial companies that offer custom Hadoop distributions, support, training and more (with Hortonworks and Cloudera being prime examples).
Now, there are many types of technology bridges being created to integrate Hadoop’s capabilities with other powerful tools. These include tools to bridge Hadoop and coud platforms like OpenStack, and a new bridge between Hadoop and the very powerful R statistics-focused programming language.