Researchers Find Hadoop is on the Rise, But It's Hard, Very Hard

Another report has rolled in forecasting huge growth for Hadoop in the Big Data space, but not everyone agrees that Hadoop adoption is going so smoothly. Allied Market Research has forecasted that the global market for Hadoop along with related hardware, software, and services will reach $50.2 billion by 2020, propelled by greater use of raw, unstructured, and structured data.

Meanwhile,  Gartner, Inc.'s 2015 Hadoop Adoption Study, involving 284 Gartner Research Circle members, found that only 125 respondents who completed the whole survey had already invested in Hadoop or had plans to do so within the next two years. The study found that there are difficulties in implementing Hadoop, including hardship in finding skilled Hadoop professionals.

Notably, Allied Research’s study grouped the Hadoop market into software, hardware, and services. It found that Hadoop services now account for 50 percent of the overall global market. While Hadoop implementations are going on, people need help.

Researchers at Gartner have been in the news for throwing some shade on Hadoop as survey respondents cite difficulties in hiring staffers with Hadoop knowledge.

The folks at MapR, which focuses on Hadoop and offers its own distribution, have an interesting rebuttal to the findings, though, as reported here.

MapR's rebuttal post to the Gartner findings notes the following:

 There has been tremendous success and value derived from Hadoop by those data-centric companies that have crossed into mainstream production usage of Hadoop to power their business. This is what MapR customers are experiencing. We invested early and deeply in the underlying data platform in our Hadoop distribution to make it operationally-ready for success as a production system. Not just for Web 2.0 companies, but for mainstream organizations and enterprise IT.

In order to deploy mission-critical applications on Hadoop, customers need enterprise-grade features. Customers also require more than batch capabilities. The market is shifting to real-time applications. MapR has invested heavily from day one to create an enterprise-grade, trusted platform to support real-time applications. Customers might be slow to adopt a batch-oriented Hadoop distribution that lacks production grade features, but the demand for Hadoop from MapR continues to accelerate.

MapR claims that its customers experienced payback in less than 12 months and greater than 5X returns on their investment when deploying Hadoop.

In other news out of MapR this week, the company announced the general availability of Apache Drill 1.0 in the MapR Distribution. Drill, which we've covered before, delivers self-service SQL analytics without requiring pre-defined schema definitions, dramatically reducing the time required for business analysts to explore and understand data. We interviewed MapR's Tomer Shiran in conjunction with the news, and you can find the story here.