While talking about a new year’s next cool thing or development is a thoroughly enjoyable ritual, discussing what will not change provides valuable lessons for technology adoption strategy and investment planning, and highlights potential future disruptions.
So what are the five things that will remain more or less the same in 2014 for big data analytics?
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Hadoop will NOT REPLACE ETL: The nine-year old platform has achieved great traction, and its mindshare has significantly increased. Well-known analytics providers such as Cloudera, Hortonworks, and MapR have supported it for a couple of years, and even the big boys such as IBM and Pivotal have embraced it. However, Hadoop’s proponents are positioning it as a panacea for all the ills of big data. The antagonists are equally up to the task, denouncing it as one of the important, yet small, pieces of the puzzle. Most Hadoop proponents confuse ETL as an “activity,” rather than a “process.” The way in which ETL is performed in a Hadoop framework set-up may differ, but it does not make ETL redundant or replaceable.
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Analytics will still be UNDEMOCRATIC: Innovative data analysis and visualization technology players such as Tableau, QlikView, Alteryx, and Tibco (Spotfire) have gained traction as “end user” friendly products. And mega providers such as SAP have increased their efforts in this direction (e.g., rebranding SAP Visual Intelligence as SAP Lumira). However, despite significant efforts to “consumerize” big data analysis and move the power out of the ivory towers of data scientists, 2014 will witness only incremental changes in this regard.
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Big Data will still be a PROJECT: Organizations always pilot a new technology before they put it into mainstream production. However, this attitude defeats the purpose of big data analytics. To gain real advantage from the deluge of data, companies must engrain a big data mindset into their DNA, rather than treating it as a silo “project.” Will 2014 see organizations jettisoning their age-old habits to wholeheartedly adopt big data analytics? Not according to my market conversations.
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Real talent will be TOUGH to find: Every technology transformation comes with “talent imposters,” and organizations desperate for talent will hire some of these and then repent later. Unfortunately, most of the existing data warehousing and business intelligence analysts masquerade themselves as “big data talent.” And the mushrooming of big data certifications and aggressive resume fabrication will not make organizations’ hiring task any easier in 2014.
- Integration will be a CHALLENGE: Technology providers such as Attunity, Dell Boomi, Talend, and Informatica have created multiple solutions to integrate disparate data sources for a consistent analysis framework. Most of these solutions work with data sources such as Amazon Redshift, IBM PureData System for Analytics (Netezza), HP Vertica, SAP HANA, and Teradata. However, organizations continue to face challenges in seamlessly integrating these, and are thus unable to extract meaningful value from their big data analytics engagements. While we’ll see major improvement in this area in 2014, a world in which different data sources are seamlessly integrated and analyzed will still be a mirage.
With cloud-based data management, modeling, and analytics disrupting the landscape, coupled with the rise of in-memory computing, the big data market will continue to surprise: we’ll see technology providers entering “unknown” domains, competing with their partners, and even cannibalizing existing offerings.
What are your takes on big data analytics in 2014 and beyond?
