Vermont Country Store invested in data mining software because they hired somebody who had experience in the financial services industry, and she used the software to demonstrate that she could find more responsive customers for their mailings.
At what point would it ever make sense for Apple to admit to specializing in hardware (and user experience) and cede back some territory to Google on data and software?
Kaskade, the newly-appointed CEO of Infochimps, believes CIOs are ready to embrace open source big datasoftware and that the established IT players, lacking open source experience, will have to buy their way into the market.