Big Data Becomes a Market Force, Ushering in Change

As reported here earlier, a new KPGM study on cloud computing trends at enterprises shows that executives are very focused on extracting business metrics from their cloud computing and data analytics platforms. That suggests that we're going to continue to see the cloud and the Big Data trend evolve together this year.

Here are some of the biggest things to know about Big Data as we begin the new year.

Big Data is a Market Force.  In case you missed it, one of the successful IPOs of the last part of 2014 came from Hortonworks, which focuses on open source Big Data platform Hadoop. The success of the IPO drove home how focused many enterprises are on yielding more useful insights from their troves of data than standard data mining tools can provide. There will be other IPOs surrounding the Big Data trend, which is now a powerful market force.

Certification and Validation on the Rise. Companies are looking for employees with Big Data skills, and they are demanding certified and validated solutions. With that in mind, Hortonworks has extended its technology partner program with the addition of three new certifications it offers. The new enterprise components of the certification program, called HDP Operations Ready, HDP Security Ready and HDP Governance Ready, are targeted to enable organizations to adopt a modern data architecture with the Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP), supported by key enterprise Hadoop capabilities required of an enterprise data platform. Other players will follow with similar offerings.

Consideration is Becoming Adoption.  As is true with OpenStack and open cloud platforms, some enterprises are still just considering Big Data strategies, but that is changing. As Matt Asay notes: "If 2014 was the year that enterprises desperately tried to take off the Big Data training wheels, 2015 will be the year they succeed. Ironically, this won't be because they master the intricacies of Hadoop and Spark. Instead, it will be because 2015 will be the year we stop trying to make every data problem into a Hadoop problem and instead use the right tool for the job."

Forrester Research wrote last month that Hadoop is now "a must have for large organizations." And, indeed, large companies ranging from Yahoo to eBay make extensive use of the platform.

Big Data Training Will Expand.  Hortonworks now offers extensive training on Hadoop-centric topics, as we covered here, but Hadoop is not the only player in Big Data. Tools like Apache Drill and other solutions will yield useful training offerings. Analysts and developers can use Drill to interactively explore data in Hadoop or other NoSQL databases, such as HBase and MongoDB. Apache always does a good job of evolving training solutions alongside its platforms.

In enterprises as well as small businesses, the Big Data trend--sorting and sifting large data sets with new tools in pursuit of surfacing meaningful angles on stored information--is on the rise. We'll see this arena on the rise in 2015.