Really cool. Hadoop is pretty mature and Yahoo's shown it works well on large clusters, but it can be a bear to install, maintain, and learn. I'm sure many companies wouldn't hesitate to pay a few bucks to get another company to help them get up and running faster.
"Their welfare depends on the usability and reliability of the product being mediocre or worse. "
Some shops have an attitude that is the opposite of "NIH" and "DIY", preferring to source existing experts instead of building in-house talent. There are few things that are easy in the edge cases, and fewer that are easy and worthwhile. With Hadoop, however, there is a lot of money to be made supporting the edge cases.
EDIT: I replied to a comment that has since been deleted? Neato!
It's pretty hokey, either running through the shell or calling a REST service through a proxy, but it's been done if you're allergic to non-scripting languages.
