Forrester anticipates that firms will spend nearly $800 million on Hadoop and Hadoop-related services in 2017. This is according to new research in which Vice President and Principal Analyst Brian Hopkins analyzed the future of Hadoop, interviewing key players such as Cloudera, Hortonworks, IBM, MapR, and Teradata.

In the new report, Forrester outlined what businesses should expect now that we’ve hit the 10th anniversary of Hadoop’s transition from a pure open source model. According to the research, Hadoop vendors now face a number of challenges, including:

  • Hadoop is getting harder to define. Hadoop continues to become a growing amalgamation of open source data technologies as the key market players add additional projects into their distributions that can exist without Hadoop (e.g., Apache Spark and Apache Kafka).
  • The cloud will disrupt on-premises Hadoop. Hadoop deployments in the cloud are a key focus for enterprise architecture and business technology pros with 40% of executives saying “public cloud big data services” are a priority for their enterprise’s big data strategy.
  • Hadoop’s success depends on cooperation. While cloud vendors are busy enabling alternatives to core Hadoop software components, the on-premises Hadoop vendors are still fiercely competing over things like security, metadata, and governance. Unless they unify their strategies and improve interoperability, firms will likely use less Hadoop as they move into the cloud.

Click here for more information, and please contact us if you’d like a copy of this report.