Hadoop rather mapreduce came from Google which is a great innovation.

Cassandra came from Dynamo; And Dynamo is from Amazons R and D efforts. Btw Amazon is an innovation as it leads to large amount of savings in energy.

Thrift,Tornado,HipHop -> not innovations useful programming tools but not gonna change anything.

Rarely any innovations have come out of Web Applications. In fact the best innovation in data mining [The correct term for Big Data], have come from Universities or R&D efforts of IBM/MSFT/Google/IBM/Amazon.