Tim Gasper (Product Manager at Big Data platform Infochimps) has an informative article at TechCrunch that provides an overview of five open-source technologies trending now for Big Data applications. They are: Storm and Kafka (for processing stream data) Drill and Dremel (for ad-hoc queries of big data) R (for data science with big data) Gremlin and Giraph (for graph analysis, e.g. of social networks) SAP HANA (for in-memory analytics). HANA isn't an open-source tool though, so perhaps the fifth slot should really go to ... Honourable mention D3, for web-based visualization. Regarding R, Gasper says that it is "incredibly powerful", "the new standard for statistics", and that "the R community is one of the most thrilling places to be in Big Data right now". He also mentions the RHadoop project ("R work very well with Hadoop") and the up-and-coming Julia project. You can read Gasper's complete overview of R and the other trending big-data technologies at link below. TechCrunch: Big Data Right Now: Five Trendy Open Source Technologies