Last week at the Hadoop Summit in San Jose, industry experts came together to discuss the future of this analytics platform. SiliconANGLE covered each of the sessions and what we learned is though Hadoop already has achieved a broad acceptance, the opportunities for a more vast global dissemination are on the radar of private companies that have adopted a proprietary model that overlays the open source programming.

According to Amr Awadallah, the CTO and co-founder of Cloudera, “The ecosystem is definitely growing. Five years ago it was just Cloudera, [with] no other commercial vendor trying to enable Hadoop in the enterprise.” Awadallah went on to state how the field now has upwards of ten other companies now offering the same styled product as Cloudera. He continues, “That’s a healthy thing, that’s a sign of a growing market. It’s a very healthy sign of maturity.”

Another expert in the field, Scott Howser, vice president of marketing for Hadapt, offered up a promising view of the future of Hadoop when, referring to its potential to replace the traditional data warehouse said, “long term, that’s our vision.” He believes Hadoop, as it is more widely accepted, will eventually present itself as an economically viable alternative to the more traditional data infrastructures.

It is this last point that hits the bottom line for most outfits when deciding to implement this new data management option. But Howser believes the cost benefit of implementation is far from the only benefit an organization might enjoy switching to Hadoop. In fact, he says it’s about “revenue opportunities that you’re missing otherwise.” This, according to SiliconANGLE’s own Alina Popescu, is highlighted not solely on a company’s cost reduction on infrastructure, but the revenue curve changes for the customer by accessing and analyzing data.

Speaking to the strength of Hadoop, Awadallah claims, “Our focus should be to continue to work as a community to push the platform forward.” He extolled those in attendance, “Please don’t just be takers. That is a selfish behavior and it won’t help the platform in the long run.” As it is an open source platform, its survival is tied directly to improvements that might be offered by independent engineers, not just on the one-way relationship that would lead to its broad adoption.

The original growth trajectory of Hadoop may have been initially overstated. One such prediction, made by Hortonworks, was that a full one-half of the world’s data would be hosted by Hadoop. Hortonworks walked back that prediction, changing the wording of their forecast to state that same amount of data would be “hosted” by Hadoop by 2015.

Awadallah finished by saying, “Europe is definitely our next big focus. It’s growing very quickly.” And with Europe, according to Awadallah, being some two years behind the US in adoption of this platform, the growth outlook for Hadoop is extremely positive.