There is a reason why Hadoop has become the center of the analytics discussion. The framework can process more kinds of information and faster than traditional data warehouses at a fraction of the cost, yet a new study reveals that organizations are in no rush to switch.

Nearly two=thirds of the 319 decision-makers that Snowflake Computing Inc., an emerging provider of cloud-based analytics, surveyed for the report believe Hadoop will not have any impact on their legacy data environments. That provides, perhaps for the first time, a tangible figure to back the long-standing argument that the open-source platform won’t bring about the demise of the traditional data warehouse anytime soon.

However, that is not to say Hadoop isn’t a strategic threat: Wikibon found that 60 percent of organizations with operational deployments have already migrated at least one workload from a traditional data warehouse or a mainframe, which heralds a shift only set to accelerate over time. But adoption of the framework is currently too limited to influence overall spending patterns, according to the study.

Just 16 percent of the respondents reported that their organizations have made an investment in a modern analytics solution and only a fraction of those projects, the majority of which are proof-of-concepts, involve Hadoop. However, with 70 percent expressing interest in adopting modern data processing technologies, that figure is poised to increase significantly.

Accordingly, over 30 percent of the participants believe that at least some of the information they’re currently keeping in a data warehouse will eventually move to Hadoop. But there are still many hurdles in the way, most notably the lack of professionals with the skills to take full advantage of the platform’s capabilities.

A full 71 percent of the decision-makers who took part in the survey named the talent shortage as the main barrier to adoption, with only 12 percent saying that their organizations have easily access to Hadoop expertise. That drops to five percent among companies with less than 1000 employees, a stark contrast to the over 90 percent claiming to have SQL skills on hand in both segments.

That’s an encouraging figure since there is already an abundance of structured query options available for Hadoop. Coupled with the growing number of analytics professionals entering the job market every year thanks to the educational efforts of major vendors such as MapR Technologies, Inc. and Cloudera Inc., that puts the framework on a fast track towards mass adoption. However, it’s clear that the traditional data warehouse is here to stay for the time being.