Australian has shown an openness to try certain technologies earlier than other markets, and Cloudera identifies Big Data as one of those early adopter technologies.

"Australia is quite innovative and had a mindset of getting into a new technology, so the market is open to trying new solutions and have them up running quickly," Cloudera COO, Kirk Dunn, said.

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While Dunn characterises Australia as being "fairly innovative" overall, he said this is particularly true when compared to other markets in the Asia Pacific region.

"That's why a lot of US companies come to Australia, usually early in their Asia Pacific expansion, because this market tends to be pretty advanced," he said.

The market may consist of only four major banks and a few large telcos, but Dunn said they tend to do things "on the front end."

"This is in contrast to a market like Japan, which is a massive economy with numerous banks and telcos, but one where they tend to be more conservative about the way they would roll out a new solution," he said.

Big Data becomes real

Big Data and data science is nothing new, but Dunn said the expanded scope of the technology is.

"Credit card companies, banks and insurance companies have been doing data science for a long time," he said.

"The difference now is that the ability to do science across a much larger corpus of data."

Dunn adds that now there is also the capability to apply different analytic engines to that data, where the data and compute are brought together as opposed to separating them.

The introduction of Hadoop is what Dunn picks as a "real enabler" for organisations to start considering Big Data for their business processes.

"Hadoop is one of the rare opportunities where you can actually dabble, where you can start small and grow big," he said.

(By Patrick Budmar)