Yahoo Looking to Spin Off Hadoop into Separate Business

Yahoo is undergoing a transformation of sorts. It's focusing exclusively on content and has shut down or spun off anything that is not directly related to this core focus. It even outsourced its search engine, but there's one deeply technological project that has not only survived, but thrived in this rather harsh environment - Hadoop.

The open source cloud technology used by Yahoo to power its more laborious processes of understanding and managing the huge amounts of data the company sees each day has been developed by the company from the get go and Yahoo is one of the biggest contributors to the project.

It's hardly the only one though, Facebook, IBM and plenty of others use and develop Hadoop. Its use is also growing in the enterprise world and there are several companies selling services, products and expertise related to Hadoop.

Now, Yahoo is about to become one of them, the company is mulling the possibility of spinning off its Hadoop engineering arm into a separate company which will continue to develop the technology, but also offer services to businesses wanting to employ it.

Yahoo would not confirm this, but Benchmark Capital said that it is talking with Yahoo about this new venture, the Wall Street Journal reports. The venture capital firm is rather excited about the opportunity and believes that Hadoop has the potential of becoming a multi-billion market.

Similarly, it believes Yahoo can turn its Hadoop arm into a billion dollar business. It's hardly the only company looking to monetize Hadoop. Cloudera is the best known, the startup develops the software and offers services to enterprises looking to deploy it.

IBM is also investing in the technology, interestingly enough Watson, IBM's supercomputer that was pitted against the best human Jeopardy player recently (and won), is also powered by Hadoop.

If Yahoo is serious about the opportunity and actually manages to create a successful business out of it, it may be a sign that the web giant can still turn around and can still expand beyond its traditional role.