Thursday, June 09, 2011

Hadoop: When Will The Inevitable Backlash Begin? | Forrester Blogs

Excerpt from a timely Big Data reality check by Jim Kobielus

Hadoop is no fad, but it is definitely getting set up for a sober reappraisal — possibly by this time next year, or as soon as a significant number of major EDW vendors roll out their Hadoop products and strategies. I’ve already painted in broad brushstrokes the milestones that Hadoop needs to pass to be considered truly ready for enterprise prime time. I’m reasonably confident that it will meet those challenges over the next two to three years. I’m even willing to meet the open-source absolutists halfway on their faith that the Apache community will be guided by some invisible hand toward a single market-making distro with universal interoperability, peace, love, and understanding.

But even if Hadoop stays on track toward maturation, we’re likely to see the inevitable backlash emerge, spurred by the widespread impatience that usually follows overweening hype. The snarkfest will come as analytics pros start to realize that, promising as this new approach may be, there are plenty of non-Hadoop EDWs that can address the core petabyte-scale use cases I laid out. Many IT practitioners will ask why they should pay good money for a new way of doing things, with all the concomitant disruptions and glitches, when they can simply repurpose their investments in platforms like Teradata, Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft.

Hadoop: When Will The Inevitable Backlash Begin? | Forrester Blogs

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