It’s a pretty standard rule-of-thumb for successful IT organizations: Identify a compelling use case first, and then invest in the applicable technology.

But what if the technology doesn’t exist yet?

That, unfortunately, is the dilemma facing many forward-thinking enterprises when it comes to Hadoop. They’ve got ideas about new, innovative ways to monetize Big Data, but few applications to let them do it.

Let’s say, for example, you’re a business analyst at a pharmaceutical maker and you’ve come up with an idea to correlate sales data with demographic data with social media data to identify new revenue opportunities. You present your idea to the CEO, who gives you the green light. “Get it done,” she says.

Fantastic. You talk to IT, spin-up an inexpensive Hadoop cluster, then collect, process and store the needed data. Next you take a look at the Hadoop application market and …. and you quickly realize you’re out of luck. You discover there are no compelling applications on the market to suit your innovative use case. Developing the application internally maybe isn’t an option. Your great idea for leveraging Hadoop is DOA.

Note to Mega-Software Vendors: We’re Waiting!

If this type of scenario continues to occur with regularity across industries, Hadoop will remain a specialty tool of the big web companies and little more. What needs to happen for Hadoop to go mainstream is the development of a robust market of vertically-targeted, use-case-specific Hadoop applications that enable enterprises to actually do something with all that data they collect, process and store in Hadoop.

There are a handful of start-ups hard at work now building the Hadoop applications of the future – among them Datameer, Tresata and Tidemark — and more will surely emerge thanks to available capital via the Big Data Fund and other investment sources. But start-ups can’t do it alone.

Let’s be honest, most enterprises are not early technology adopters and many are downright terrified to adopt a new approach such as Hadoop. They’ve invested a lot of cash and resources in existing BI platforms and EDWs, and they are only going to buy into Hadoop if their incumbent software vendors validate the approach with cost-effective applications that deliver real business value of their own.

That means the mega-software vendors – namely SAP, Oracle, Microsoft and IBM –need to redouble (and in some cases start) their efforts to build Hadoop-compatible applications and, just as importantly, open up APIs to allow outside Hadoop application developers access to their technology.

Press Your Incumbent Vendors on Hadoop Applications

The enterprise has an important role to play as well. There’s a lot of money to be made in Big Data and the mega-software vendors know it. When you have a great new idea to leverage Hadoop, but your incumbent vendor doesn’t have an app for that, ask them why. Ask them what they are doing to build next generation Hadoop applications and ask them to be specific. How they are going to help you achieve your goals? Are the contributing to the Apache Hadoop project and, in turn, learning from all the great contributions being made by the open source community?

If the vendor can’t (or won’t) answer these questions, don’t be shy in letting them know you’re not averse to finding an alternative vendor in Hadoop start-up land to meet your needs (and mean it!)

To give them credit, in 2011 most of mega-vendors (SAP being the big exception, which is focusing its Big Data efforts on HANA) largely realized that they need to get into the Hadoop game and are slowly-but-surely making strides in the right direction. IBM’s Big Insights platform is based on Hadoop, Microsoft is working on delivering Hadoop on Windows Azure, and Oracle has developed its own Hadoop distributions in conjunction with its new Big Data Appliance. But notice all of these efforts involve the data storing and processing layer, not applications.

The mega-software vendors need to do more around Hadoop applications. A little (or a big) nudge from customers, as well as a thriving start-up community passing them by with innovative Hadoop applications to spur them on, will make it happen that much faster.