LexisNexus just open sourced their data analysis platform, HPCC.

Competition in the data analysis space is a good thing. I don’t know enough about HPCC to compare it to Hadoop just yet. However, developers have to learn a new language ECL, which has a relatively sophisticated syntax, to run analysis jobs on HPCC.

I find it unlikely that most developers will be willing to spend the time to learn that new language until a community springs up to show what advantages HPCC offers over Hadoop. The supposed advantage of ECL’s conciseness in expressing analysis jobs is in relation to Java. The real test comes when comparing ECL to Clojure and Scala, much better programming languages for concise MapReduce jobs.

Further reading: LexisNexus open sources Hadoop competitor (GigaOm)