I had previously commented on the lack of analytics-focused companies at STRATA. Now, to my surprise, two of the three big "M's" in proprietary computer algebra systems made a showing: Mathematica and MATLAB (the third being Maple). With the strength of the open-source software movement in "big data" and technical computing, I was wondering about what value they had to offer.
After having some discussions with them, the most important thing they offer is a consistent and tested user experience with high-quality documentation and technical support. This is something open source software needs to work on. I've alluded to this in a post most of two years ago and it is still applicable today and I don't see any major change in the user experience of open source software (hope it works on Windows, hope it compiles, hope the docs are good, hope I can email the author of the code, hope this package with this version number works with that package with at this version number, hope it runs fast...etc.) . I guess it's just a natural consequence of open source software; open source is flexible, cutting-edge, and cool but not necessarily user-friendly.
In a related note, on the hardware side, Cray, a brand name in scientific computing, is leveraging its high-performance computing experience for "big data". This is in contrast to computing on commodity hardware which is what Hadoop was intended for.
This is all in the general trend of technical computing (historically driven by scientific applications) merging with the "big data" world.
