On Wednesday, the Wall Street Journal that Yahoo is mulling the idea of setting up its Hadoop development team as a new standalone company, one that would continue to develop the software and offer Hadoop-related consulting services.

"This is another good sign that the Hadoop space continues to grow," said Justin Borgman, co-founder and CEO of Hadapt, which provides tools for bridging Hadoop with data warehouses. "This will put the pressure on other Hadoop companies. The more competition the better."

Hadoop is "the biggest movement in enterprise software in years," Benchmark Capital partner Rob Bearden told the Wall Street Journal. Forrester Research senior analyst James Kobielus has estimated that the market for Hadoop products and services could grow to US$1 billion per year.

Hadoop that resides across multiple servers, making it suitable for analyzing larger amounts of information than the typical data warehouse can handle.

Yahoo has been instrumental in developing the Hadoop data processing platform, and it devotes considerable engineering resources to the project. Yahoo uses the technology for the data processing and analysis needed to personalize content and advertisements for users. Other giant Internet services, such as eBay, Facebook and Twitter, also use the technology.