Hadoop at 10

Wow – 10 years of Hadoop, what a ride. Actian has been working in the Hadoop ecosystem almost since the beginning, starting in 2007. Actian started working with Hortonworks the moment they launched in 2011.

As a pioneer in this space, we have witnessed the whole “boom”. And while Hadoop is continuing to show healthy growth, and becoming a vital platform for business-critical analytic workloads, the customer mindset is clearly moving beyond the programmer-led early-adopter stage to an early-majority enterprise adoption stage.

With this inevitable maturing of the Hadoop marketplace, we see some painful “shake-out” looming, as these new customers demand the enterprise-class capabilities they have rightly come to expect. And not only will product expectations be increasingly enterprise-class, but vendors in the Hadoop space will be increasingly scrutinized for their own viability, as a proven track record of business success will turn out to be just as important as “cool products”.

This will make 2016 a very interesting year – to borrow a phrase from Warren Buffet, it is only when the tide goes out that you see who is swimming without a suit. Well, this year the tide of easy money and easy product promises is going out, and we may quickly learn who is “exposed”.