The 2015 edition of the Wikibon Big Data survey shows companies making steady progress in adoption of Hadoop and associated technologies, writes Wikibon Big Data Analyst George Gilbert.  In the 18 months since the last survey, the number of survey respondents reporting at least one production deployment has risen to 41 percent, a 10 percent increase.

As with all major enterprise technology adoption cycles, the customer’s ability to deploy the software is gated by the ability to absorb and assimilate complex behavior. Specific issues to growth of adoption of on-premises Hadoop include high administrative overhead and the difficulty of acquiring or developing the specialized technical skills the new technologies require.

The survey shows a lot of unconsumed software piling up in customer “inventory”. This is similar to what happened during the ERP and enterprise Internet infrastructure bubbles in the 1990s. Gilbert suggests that it also may in part be indicative of vendors pushing larger deals on customers to make the economics of direct sales work in an era of subscription software with no up-front revenue.

He also sees Hadoop-as-a-service and cloud-native Big Data services from AWS, Azure and Google as “hidden challengers” to on-premise sales. These are easier for customers to use because they put the burden of administration and special skills provisioning on the service provider.

The full report is available on Wikibon Premium

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