'Lack of maturity' in Hadoop big data analytics space, says Hotels.com CTO

Thierry Bedos, chief technology officer at Hotels.com says analytical tools providers have yet to catch up to a shift towards Hadoop

There's a "lack of maturity" in the big data analytical tools market because many of the major solution providers have yet to provide a toolset that's compatible with datasets stored within Hadoop open source software.

That's according to Thierry Bedos, chief technology officer at Hotels.com, the hotel room booking service that forms part of the Expedia group, who made the comments in an interview with Computing.

Bedos was describing how Hotels.com analyses user data in an effort to provide regular hotel room-bookers with a service that is tailored to their needs. That, he said, has seen Hotels.com shift away from SQL and towards Hadoop.

"We are moving more and more into Hadoop. You see some of the traditional analytics tools that are slowly moving into the Hadoop world where traditionally they'd have been in SQL," said Bedos.

"So, we're an early adopter of some of these tools and clearly what we see is a bit of a lack of maturity of the whole market, around a tool that can support the likes of Hadoop."

When pressed on why he thought there was a lack of maturity in the big data space, Bedos explained that it's because there's still a lack of vendors who've built proper analytical tools for use alongside Hadoop.

"The reason I feel there's a lack of maturity is because traditionally those analytical tools have been using RBDMS [relational database management system] as their primary data platform. And now Hadoop has been getting a lot of momentum and you see there are lots of tools to do development on top of Hadoop," he said.

"But the analytical tools have yet to move to that platform. Because once you've got all your data in Hadoop, it's very easy for developers to come up with algorithms to exploit the data. But for analysts, to be able to drill down through that data, that's where we see the market is not quite there yet."

However, Bedos told Computing that he believes it won't be too long before analytical tools for Hadoop reach maturity, mainly because of the sheer number of firms that are now moving into the space.

"But players are catching up, they're moving into that space, they're realising that Hadoop is a big platform, it's a platform that lots of organisations are adopting and they are moving into that space, but that obviously takes a bit of time," he said.