Every so often... something comes along that just makes tasks that seem almost impossible... well simple. Cloudera is a company that is doing just that.

They are making Hadoop available to normal developers... and that is huge. When the common man is able to setup a Hadoop cluster ( kinda like Googles environment ) and create things that NASA could not do just a few short years ago... things are going to get interesting... fast.

What they have done is created a system that helps you install and maintain a Hadoop cluster... and made it so simple that anyone with a solid background in Linux will follow easily. On top of that they made it nice and shiny.

Then they went a step further and created the Cloudera Desktop... something that makes WORKING with a cluster almost as easy as working on your laptop.

My take on this is that it will be used by progressive IT shops and startups everywhere in the next 2 years.