Apache Spark might be stealing all of the headlines in Big Data circles these days, but Hadoop remains as hot as ever, according to a new forecast from Research and Markets that predicts strong growth through 2021.

The research firm said this week the global market for Hadoop will grow at a 63.4 percent compound annual growth rate over the next five years, hitting $84.6 billion by 2021.Research and Markets attributes the growth to strong enterprise demand, particularly in Europe, where annual growth rates will top 65 percent. It also points to higher rates of adoption in North America, especially in the IT, banking and government sectors, which are keen to embrace Big Data strategies.

Research and Markets’ forecast includes Hadoop software, hardware and services, with the latter accounting for almost half (49 percent) of global demand. It said Hadoop services include integration and deployment, middleware and support, and noted that consulting and related services alone accounted for some $1.6 billion in revenues last year. Integration and deployment services are the fastest growing Hadoop services segment at 64.8 percent however, driven by increased investment in Big Data analytics and “real-time operations.”

Among the key end users driving Hadoop adoption, the forecast highlights the “trade and transportation” sectors as the fastest area of growth, with an annual growth rate of 76.3 percent through 2021. The report also points to the banking, financial services, healthcare, manufacturing, media and entertainment, retail and telecommunications sectors as other important key end-users of Hadoop products and services.

“Factors such as aggrandized generation of structured and unstructured data and efficient and affordable data processing services offered by Hadoop technology are the major drivers of the market,” the researchers said in a statement.

Research and Markets’s report also highlighted some of the potential roadblocks in the path of Hadoop’s adoption. The stunning rise of Apache Spark is one, while others include distributed computing and security issues, the researchers said.

The report also identified Hadoop’s market leaders as Hortonworks Inc., Cloudera Inc. and MarkLogic, all of which have “focused on development of advanced, Hadoop-based data storage, management, and analytics solutions to cater to the customized requirements of business enterprises.”

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