Big Data Is Dead. Long Live Big Data AI.

In December 2014, I asked whether we were at the beginning of "the end of the Hadoop bubble." I kept updating my Hadoop bubble watch (here and here) through the much-hyped IPOs of Hortonworks and Cloudera. The question was whether an open-source distributed storage technology which Google invented (and quickly replaced with better tools) could survive as a business proposition at a time when enterprises have moved rapidly to adopting the cloud and "AI"--advanced machine learning or deep learning. In January 2019, perennially unprofitable Hortonworks closed an all-stock $5.2 billion merger with Cloudera. In May 2019, another Hadoop-based provider, MapR, announced that it would shut down if it were unable to find a buyer or a new source of funding.