Hadoop is moving forwards at a rather remarkable pace. It seems like there are almost daily announcements of new partnerships, new deployment options and regular customer success stories.
What follows is a round up of some of those I think are interesting, and important, from the past month with a few of my thoughts by vendor. Let me know in the comments if I missed something you think is important!
Now rewind back to March 2014 – it is not that long ago. I was honoured to be a member of the sponsor panel at the Gartner BI Summit in London. During that session they asked each of the panellists if the term Big Data would still be around in 3 years time. My answer was that I thought the term would be gone by then (read a CBR article here). Here is the quote of what I said from the CBR article “My personal view about this is Big Data has been around forever and it will keep growing. Technology is going to change so it will move forward, but frankly it is just a buzzword, it will go away, there will be something else”
Is this latest Gartner move the end of Big Data as a term? Is my prediction coming true?
According to this Gartner report Hadoop faces challenges breaking into the enterprise. This assertion is not one I have experienced in working with customers all over Europe and Asia Pacific nor is it one that seems to be supported by the rapid growth of Hadoop ecosystem related organizations.
With Hortonworks recently declaring their Q2 results I thought now would be a good time to take stock of where Hadoop is in its adoption curve. I have focused on the two vendors who seem to have the largest market share that have declared some sort of revenue and customer count numbers: Cloudera and Hortonworks. Before I start let me say I do not work for any of these organizations. I have done my best to ensure the accuracy of these numbers using public postings and assumptions but I am open to any corrections from the named vendors if they want to contact me.
It’s time. The first of the big data V’s, volume, seems to be coming under control technology wise, even if that technology has not been implemented everywhere. Prices of disks and memory are tumbling and the introduction of technologies, such as Hadoop, are making vast amounts of data cheap to store.
On top of that, numerous technologies have made it easier to process and manage that massive volume of data. In short, the technologies and tools organizations need to deal with the problem of volume are now readily available.
Just when it seemed we could all take a small break from the big data assault on our organizations, since now we can store and process massive amounts of data, the second V, velocity, is gaining in importance – and most organizations are not ready.
So you’ve been monitoring or are already on the journey with Hadoop — and you’re wondering: Where are we on the adoption curve compared to the market in general?
Based on my interactions with numerous companies, I want to share what I think that curve looks like so that you can orientate your organization and decide if you’re leading the way or lagging behind. Neither is inherently bad, but you do need to be conscious of where you are and why.