New data from Deutsche Bank Group AG suggests that the explosive adoption of Hadoop will have a tangible impact on enterprise technology spending in 2015. The research counters some recent dour assessments of Hadoop’s enterprise-readiness and should put a smile on the faces of vendors pushing the bandwagon.

Standing to gain the most from increased investments in Hadoop are the distributors commercializing the project. Hortonworks Inc., which is one of the top players in that space and the first to hit the stock exchange, saw its revenue more than quadruple in 2014 from the previous year – momentum that Deutsche Bank’s report suggests is only set to increase over the next 12 months.

Nearly half of the technology leaders that the German investment powerhouse surveyed indicated that Hadoop plays a role in their analytics plans, with implementations varying from prototype deployments to full-blown production clusters powering business processes. The differences are even more pronounced among sectors.

The chief executive officer of a major retailer told Deutsche Bank that he is experimenting with the framework to analyze supply chain and security operations, while another participant from a global telco was working on a full-blown business intelligence solution. And the financial services giant is itself in the advance stages of implementing Hadoop, an initiative that has admittedly had its fair share of legacy impediments, which is hardly uncommon.

The issues involved in deploying the platform on an organizational scale are gradually fading as practitioners become more familiar with the framework and vendors like Hortonworks continue to improve their solutions. That should not only help drive adoption among the more than half of large enterprises that the survey indicates have not yet jumped on the bandwagon but also move more existing deployments from pilot to production.

Once an organization makes the leap, the revenue potential for vendors begins to grow exponentially. The additional software licenses and professional services that the CIO needs to buy from their distributor in order to scale their environment represent only the tip of the iceberg. There is an equally substantial, if not bigger, opportunity for the partners providing the value-added offerings needed to implement advanced production applications on top of Hadoop.

Overall, Deutsche Bank sees organizations spending considerably more on the framework in 2015 than before. The question is which players will take greatest advantage of the opportunity.

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