InfoChimps - Bringing 'Real World' Expertise to Hadoop

InfoChimps  is offering cloud-based BigData platform to provide out-of-the-box (or is that out-of-the-cloud?) Hadoop service.  Plenty of details at the link, as well as GigaOm commentary here.

The new Infochimps Platform is essentially a publicly available version of what the company has built internally to process and analyze the data it stores within its marketplace. As Infochimps CEO Joe Kelly puts it, the company is “giving folks … the iPod to our iTunes.”

Me, I think this is the start of something really good.

The thing is, there is a ton of activity in the Hadoop space, with everybody and their brother tossing their hat into the ring providing some set of ancillary services based on Hadoop.
The problem with all of these are that they presume you know what you are doing!
Needless to say, you don't.
Really.
You...Just...Don't.
Let me be a bit clearer - the vast majority of people out there who could use Hadoop-based services fall into two categories

1. People who are generating a ton of data, need to do something with it, and have no clue whatsoever as to how.  (If they don't know what, then they're clearly in the wrong biz.)
2. People who know how, but don't have the first idea of how one sets up the platform/infrastructure to "do the how"

The beautiful thing about what InfoChimps has done is that they are providing answers to both (1) and (2), and much more importantly, based on real-world experience. 

They've already dealt with the pain of setting up clusters, figuring out what actions need to be monitored, how to move data around and partition it, how to track batch jobs, etc., etc.  Its all stuff that you'd eventually figure out after a lot of trial and error (and trust me, there will be trial and error), but now you can take advantage of the lessons they've learned!

Its not unlike what Amazon has done with AWS, just at a different level.  Kudos to InfoChimps - I hope to see more products and services doing the same thing in the future...