One of the not so nice parts of the conference is seeing companies that have technology that have been superseded by the new releases of Hadoop, primarily Hive. One company, boasted about the fact it did not have to do full scans and could return SQL queries in seconds on large datasets. The look on the booth attendant’s face was initially startled, when I asked how his company’s technology was different then that that was included in 
Hive/Stinger’s ORCFile. Bottom-line, is that he did not have a good answer other than saying we are significantly faster than “legacy” versions of Hive.
Hadoop market is in the Cambrian Explosion stage where new vendors and solutions are coming to the market at an incredible pace. However, we do know that most will either be acquired or bankrupt within the next few years which adds risk for companies needing to invest in these niche solutions. Understand the Apache Hadoop roadmap, understand the unique capabilities of the niche provider, and understand the risks with selecting the particular niche vendor before you buy.
