[Philip Lelyveld note: Here is a nice brief intro to the three main Hadoop ("big data") players.]
To my thinking, Google Capital’s investment means that the start of the race is over. There are three major players, MapR, Cloudera, and Hortonworks, with Pivotal, WANdisco, Syncsort and dozens of others selling superchargers and enhancements. But the main event will be between the major players, each of which has a different strategy.
Read the full story here: http://www.forbes.com/sites/danwoods/2014/06/30/why-google-capital-placed-its-hadoop-bet-on-mapr/