Solomozone

Disney (s dis) is a massive company, but when it comes to its big data platform, the entertainment conglomerate looks a lot like a startup. Kind of, that is. By the sheer power of its will (and ingenuity), a small team has been able to craft a large custom platform out of Hadoop, NoSQL databases and other open-source technologies. But for better or for worse, doing big data at such a large company means playing by a different set of rules.

When it came to putting a big data platform in place, Arun Jacob, director of data solutions in the Disney Technology Solutions & Services group, told a room at the IE Group Big Data Innovation conference in Boston on Thursday that Disney chose to build something from scratch rather than buy software from a large vendor. Cost certainly played in a role, but really it was flexibility that…