The Big Data explosion in recent years has created a vast number of new technologies in the area of data processing, storage, and management. One of the biggest names to appear on the scene is Hadoop. In case you need a quick review, Hadoop is a Big Data storage system that takes in large amounts of data from servers and breaks it into smaller, manageable chunks. The technology is complex but at a high level the Hadoop ecosystem essentially takes a “divide and conquer” approach to processing Big Data instead of processing data in tables, as in a relational database like Oracle or MySQL.
One projection expects Hadoop to grow 25X to a global market value of $50.2 billion by the year 2020, driven by the continuous expansion of Big Data and related technologies. There are several reasons why Hadoop is going to continue to scale up in the next five years. Let’s take a look here at some of the major trends you and your organization should expect from this key Big Data technology through the remainder of 2015.
Hadoop will become the de facto data operating system
Hadoop is a notably complex ecosystem, and some have argued that it hasn’t caught on in the business world as rapidly as one might expect. But the market seems much more optimistic overall. As one source well states, “Distributed analytic frameworks, such as MapReduce, are evolving into distributed resource managers that are gradually turning Hadoop into a general-purpose data operating system . . . “ What this means on the ground is that more and more businesses are finding ways to adopt Hadoop as the “cornerstone” of their technology needs. Companies like Wal-Mart, Verizon Communications and Netflix use Hadoop to mine data to derive customer insights, and more on getting on the band-wagon.
SQL is making Hadoop more accessible
While Hadoop has emerged in the market as a viable solution for managing Big Data, the reality is that much of the business world is still very SQL-centric. More and more tools have emerged to make Hadoop data accessible through this familiar query language. SQL-on-Hadoop is now becoming a standard protocol and is expected to continue experiencing strong growth. The advantage of this is many-fold, most notably because it eliminates the need for businesses to hire data scientists and analysis to write complex queries in Python, Java, and JavaScript.
Hadoop is moving to the Cloud
The incessant consumer demand for bigger, better, and faster applications has created the need for big data analytics that can process at the speed of the market. Big data and cloud technologies are now integrally related. Public clouds providers such as Amazon Web Services, Google, and Microsoft, offer their own brands of big data systems in their clouds that are cost efficient and easily scalable for businesses of all sizes. Hadoop was originally designed for on-premises experimentation. The advantage of the cloud is that it solves the issue of idle time and allows businesses a very affordable way to spin up a huge cluster for big experiments.
Hadoop skills will become more mainstream
Hadoop has traditionally been a very specialized niche. But as the technology continues to scale and become “democratized” through SQL and cloud integrations mentioned above, Forrester predicts that organizations will be able to tap in-house web developers to write MapReduce jobs with Java or use SQL to query Hadoop-sized data sets.
Today’s data sizes will soon seem miniscule compared to what’s ahead in the next few years, especially considering the massive growth expected in the Internet of Things market. The biggest takeaway here is that Hadoop remains a viable and important asset for managing your Bid Data needs. Hadoop has proven resilient within the ebb and flow of the market and is fast becoming a commodity item for businesses to leverage. If you haven’t done so yet, now is the time to start figuring out your Hadoop/Big Data/Internet of Things strategy. Begin by exploring relevant use cases that will help your organization keep up with the tsunami of Big Data in the next 5 years. If you don’t, your competitors surely will.
