This sponsored post is produced by Stefan Groschupf, CEO of Datameer.
If we look at historical technology waves to predict the future of the Hadoop market, business applications are going to be the next big thing.
Technology waves always start with advancements in hardware (Moore’s Law). Next comes the wave of infrastructure, and then vertical solutions, or applications that give companies concrete solutions to very specific business problems. Those business applications, which are what truly democratize the benefits of the new technology, typically tail the wave of infrastructure by about two years.
Take the database market, for example. Obviously, there are different dimensions in this diagram because the companies are different sizes, but you can see that the business application, Business Objects, tailed the infrastructure, Oracle, by a couple of years. That is, until we crossed the chasm from early adopters to the early majority, when the growth of Business Objects accelerated exponentially, and the infrastructure growth obviously slowed down. When Oracle slowed in growth, it bought Hyperion, a business application for its infrastructure, and sales went up again.
We are seeing the exact same thing happen with Hadoop. Looking at Google search trends as an indicator, I would argue “Hadoop” is a technical search term of the early adopters, and “Big Data” is the business search term for the early majority. At one point “Big Data” growth tailed “Hadoop” growth by 24 months.
Today, we’re at the point where the search traffic is just about even.
So what is it going to take to cross the chasm? When will “Big Data” start to hockey-stick and overtake “Hadoop” growth? My money is on when more business applications like Datameer hit the market, so business users, not IT, can harness the promise of Big Data.
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