Dan Woods (Forbes):

The answer is, yes, Hadoop could be helpful, but there are other technologies as well. For example, technologies such as Splunk allow you to explore big data sets in a way that’s more interactive than most Hadoop implementations. Splunk not only lets you play with big data; you can also distill it and visualize it. Pervasive’s DataRush allows you to write parallel programs using a simplified programming model, and then process lots of data at scale. 1010data allows you to look at a spreadsheet that has a trillion rows, as well as handle time series data. EMC Greenplum and Teradata Aster Data and SAP HANA will also want a crack at your business. If you take any of these technologies and combine them with QlikView, Tableau, or TIBCO Spotfire, you can figure out what a big data set means to your business very quickly. So if your job is understanding the business value of the data, Hadoop is one of many things that you should analyze.

Translation:

Blah blah blah Big Data, blah blah blah list of vendors, blah blah blah Big Data

It might even work for a dummy CEO.

Original title and link: Explaining Hadoop to Your CEO (NoSQL database©myNoSQL)

via: http://www.forbes.com/sites/danwoods/2011/11/03/explaining-hadoop-to-your-ceo/