Hadoop: the elephant in the computer room Posted on : Apr 27 - 2015

Hadoop, according to Forrester Research, is the rising star of the business technology agenda for a simple reason — it disrupts the economics of data, analytics, and someday soon, all enterprise applications." And Forrester adds, "it is secretly becoming an application platform too."

According to Forrester, in a research paper "Hadoop is a must-have for large enterprises, forming the cornerstone of any flexible future data platform needed in the age of the customer ... Hadoop is becoming more than just a data platform. Given its economics, performance and flexibility Hadoop will become an essential piece of every company’s business technology (BT) agenda."

Hadoop, for those unfamiliar with it (its full name is Apache Hadoop, but that's rarely used nowadays) "is an open-source software framework written in Java for distributed storage and distributed processing of very large data sets on computer clusters built from commodity hardware." In other words, it's a very useful tool in the rapidly growing field of data analytics. Hadoop was created by Doug Cutting and Mike Cafarella in 2005 and the name comes from that of Cutting's son's toy elephant which in turn took his name from that of the elephant in Dr Seuss's children's story Horton Hears a Who.

So why does Forrester see this particular elephant running rampant over terrain for which it was never intended?

Hadoop, Forrester says is not "a hyped-up open source platform." According to Forrester, Hadoop has proven real value in many use cases including data lakes, traditional and advanced analytics, ETL-l and more. All these use cases are powered by its ability to linearly scale both data storage and data processing and leverage pay-per-use public cloud, according to Forrester. "Many enterprises are dabbling in Hadoop to see what it can do. Many already have mission-critical capabilities running on Hadoop, including (to mention a few): Wal-Mart, Fidelity Investments, Sears, Verizon, USAA, Cardinal Health, Wells Fargo, Proctor & Gamble, Cablevision, Nasdaq, AutoTrader, Netflix, and Yelp." View more