It’s been an interesting week in the Big Data space. Tableau and Syncsort announced a strategic partnership to unlock data in legacy information silos, KDnugget published the results of its latest data science survey, and Wikibon released a new market outlook.

Tableau announced that it has joined forces with Syncsort, a New Jersey-based provider of data integration and protection solutions, to make information more consumable for decision makers. The company married its software with Syncsort’s Hadoop-centric ETL solution to help business users extract value from their organizations’ data without having to go through a statistician.

Big Data is becoming increasingly consumable thanks to the efforts of vendors such as Tableau, but data science – and data scientists – won’t become insignificant anytime soon. A recent study found that while Tableau saw its market share increase 43 percent in the past 12 months, it still commands less than one percent of the data analytics market. In comparison, the R programming language for statistical computing saw its stake increase to 61 percent. Pig Latin, Hive, and “other Hadoop-based languages” grew 19 percent in the same period, while Perl and Ruby plummeted 50 percent and 41 percent, respectively.

Wikibon analyst Jeff Kelly estimates that overall, the Hadoop/NoSQL market topped $540 million in revenue last year, with the former sub-segment accounting for $256 million. MarkLogic led the charge with a 13 percent market share; Cloudera followed close behind with a 10 percent stake and IBM came in third at nine percent.

Kelly forecasts that the analytics market will continue to grow at a compounded annual growth rate of 45 percent over the next five years. It will reach $3.5 billion in 2017, at which point the Hadoop ecosystem will be worth over $1.6 billion.