Gartner says that the so-called ‘hype’ over Big Data is reaching its peak, and that the idea will soon descend into a ‘trough of disillusionment’. Thousands of businesses have already begun exploring ways in which Big Data can be used to provide them with strategic insights, but right about now many are starting to feel disillusioned with it.

According to Gartner’s Svetlana Sicular, technologies typically follow a similar pattern, in which they are first discovered and then completely overhyped, causing users to slowly become disillusioned with it, before finally finding realistic applications for the technology.

Sicular says that Big Data hype reached its peak “some time ago”, claiming that several of her clients have already become disillusioned with Hadoop, describing it as “primitive and old-fashioned”. She predicts that Big Data will soon begin to attract negative press as adopters of the technology voice their frustration over it.

“Organizations have fascinating ideas, but they are disappointed with a difficulty of figuring out reliable solutions,” writes Sicular.

“Their disappointment applies to more advanced cases of sentiment analysis, which go beyond traditional vendor offerings.  Difficulties are also abundant when organizations work on new ideas, which depend on factors that have been traditionally outside of their industry competence, e.g. linking a variety of unstructured data sources.”

This view contrasts with a report from research firm Ovum however, which states that vendors have been extremely positive about Big Data regardless of what users may feel. Ovum gathered its data using Datasift, mining Twitter to gain insights on the sentiments of vendors in the Big Data industry over the last year. Its research showed that positive sentiments outweighed negative sentiments of Big Data by a factor of three, suggesting that this ‘trough of disillusionment’ is only just beginning.

“Given the level of buildup and suggested hype, it surprised us that sentiment expressed about big data vendors still remained so positive in 2012,” said Ovum analyst Tony Baer in a statement.

Even so, there is one dynamic on the horizon that will likely lead to improved sentiments over Big Data, even they only comes from techie people. A report from SAS called Big Data Analytics: An Assessment of Demand for Labor and Skills 2012-2017, predicts that the demand for people with Big Data skills is likely to increase by 18% per year for the next five years, until 2017 at least.  The report is extremely optimistic about employment prospects for those with Big Data skillsets, and claims that the UK alone will create over 130,000 new positions in the industry by 2017.