Hadoop is encroaching on data warehouse (DW) territory, and database vendors are rightly concerned about the threat to their high-margin business, writes Wikibon Principal Research Contributor Jeff Kelly.

At the recent Hadoop Summit, data warehouse vendors IBM, Teradata, Microsoft and Oracle were pushing the idea of Hadoop as a junior adjunct to the data warehouse, claiming that Hadoop is still immature in important areas such as security and near real-time analysis.  That makes it an appropriate platform to feed data to the traditional DW  but not to displace it, they said.

Some, like  IBM, are counting on their analysis products and high-margin professional services to cushion the blow as lower-cost Hadoop and associated open source technologies take business away from the higher priced databases.

Kelly says the vendors have reason for their concern. Sixty-one percent of respondents to a recent Wikibon Big Data survey said they have shifted at least one workload away from a traditional data warehouse or mainframe to Hadoop, and an additional 34 percent said they are planning to do so within six months.

The price of the  open source Hadoop platform is one major attraction. Another is its ability to ingest “all sorts of data”. And as SQL-on-Hadoop products on the market from several vendors mature,  the platform will become more practical as an analytics engine.

However, vendors are also right when they argue that the data warehouse is not going away, Kelly writes. While some analysis will be better done on Hadoop, some will stay on the data warehouse indefinitely. The vendors, he concludes, should accept that Hadoop will mature into a “first-class citizen in the data center” and they should reposition their products and services as value-add components “that help practitioners turn the raw data stored in Hadoop into actionable insights on executives’ desks.”

As with all Wikibon research, this Professional Alert is available in its entirety without charge on the Wikibon Web site. IT professionals are invited to register for free membership in the Wikibon community, which allows them to participate in Wikibon research, influence the research agenda, and publish their own research, questions and comments.