Hadoop's creator discusses how the technology is making its presence felt industrywide.

Doug Cutting, creator of the open-source Hadoop framework that allows enterprises to store and analyze petabytes of unstructured data, led the team that built one of the world's largest Hadoop clusters while he was at Yahoo. Formerly an engineer at Excite, Apple and Xerox PARC, Cutting also developed Lucene and Nutch, two open-source search engine technologies now being managed by the Apache Foundation. Cutting is now an architect at Cloudera, which sells and supports a commercial version of Hadoop. Here he talks about the reasons for the surging enterprise interest in Hadoop.

How would you describe Hadoop to a CIO or a CFO?

Why should enterprises care about it? At a really simple level, it lets you affordably save and process vastly more data than you could before. With more data and the ability to process it, companies can see more, they can learn more, they can do more. [With Hadoop] you can start to do all sorts of analyses that just weren't practical before. You can start to look at patterns over years, over seasons, across demographics. You have enough data to fill in patterns and make predictions and decide, "How should we price things?" and "What should we be selling now?" and "How should we advertise?" It is not only about having data for longer periods, but also richer data about any given period.