Is it just hype? Only 18 per cent of firms plan will invest in Hadoop in next two years, claims Gartner

Demand for Hadoop "fairly anaemic", claims Gartner's Merv Adrian

Despite the mainstream attention focused on Hadoop in recent years, with IDC forecasting that it will drive a $50bn chunk of the big data market by 2020, a significant number of organisations still have no current plans for Hadoop investment, according to analyst group Gartner.

In its 2015 Hadoop Adoption Survey, Gartner asked 284 IT and business leaders their thoughts on Hadoop. It found that only 125 respondents who completed the whole survey had already invested in Hadoop, or had plans to do so within the next two years.

"Despite considerable hype and reported successes for early adopters, 54 per cent of survey respondents report no plans to invest at this time, while only 18 per cent have plans to invest in Hadoop over the next two years," said Nick Heudecker, research director at Gartner.

"Furthermore, the early adopters don't appear to be championing for substantial Hadoop adoption over the next 24 months; in fact, there are fewer who plan to begin in the next two years than already have," he added.

Gartner found that just over one-quarter (26 per cent) of respondents claimed to be either deploying, piloting or experimenting with Hadoop, while 11 per cent plan to invest within 12 months and seven per cent are planning investment in the next two years.

Merv Adrian, research vice president at Gartner, suggested that future demand for Hadoop looks "fairly anaemic over at least the next 24 months".

He suggested that the best way for providers, such as Cloudera, Hortonworks and MapR to achieve growth in their revenues would be to move to larger deployments in their existing customer base.

Gartner said that there were two main reasons that end users were being deterred from investing in Hadoop. The first was that Hadoop was not seen as a key priority, and the second was that Hadoop was seen as ‘overkill' for the problems that the business faced - suggesting that the costs outweighed the perceived benefits of the platform.

Gartner also found that skills gaps continued to be a major adoption inhibitor for 57 per cent of respondents, while figuring out how to get value from Hadoop was cited by 49 per cent of respondents.

Despite Gartner's findings, Computing has heard from many end users in the past year who have either invested in, or are looking at, investing in Hadoop.

These include, most recently, Siemens AG, British Gas, Spotify, Shazam and Candy Crush creator King. They have all explained how they are using Hadoop to their advantage, while Paddy Power CIO Fin Goulding said that Hadoop was an option that his team were considering in order to analyse unstructured data as part of an overarching new data strategy.