Hadoop set for ‘as-a-service’ boost worth billions

The awkwardly named Hadoop market is set to receive the “as-a-service” boost that is sweeping the wireless telecom space, and it could potentially reap significant rewards.
A new report from Allied Market Research predicts the Hadoop-as-a-service market could reach $16.1 billion in sales globally by 2020, based on a forecasted 70.8% compound annual growth rate. The market reportedly doubled in size last year, with the report noting strong support among “conventional” Hadoop users, despite the market currently being mostly based in North America and dominated by Amazon.com’s Elastic Map Reduce, which accounted for 85% of global market revenues in 2013. The report noted that gaming companies have been an early contributor to Haas revenues, with predictions that small to mid-sized enterprises, social media firms and SaaS providers will further contribute to growth.
The AMR report predicts the HaaS market will put pressure on the “on-premise-Hadoop” segment, with the as-a-service model overshadowing growth of the traditional model. The report noted that HaaS provides for lower upfront costs and boosts a “non-technical interface” in its prediction of superior market performance.
“Many providers are coming up with graphic and excel-based interfaces, which makes Hadoop operations easier than ever,” AMR noted. “HaaS adds flow to business operations as providers take sole responsibility of running and managing Hadoop jobs.”
As for potential stumbling blocks, AMR cited “persisting security concerns” and lack of general awareness, though information technology advances are seen as a “boon” in generating greater awareness of the service. Security concerns are also expected to subside due to the “adoption of private clouds and high security cloud storages,” with AMR adding that a move toward Amazon Web Services’ GovCloud, which complies with the U.S. International Traffic in Arms Regulations requirements, is also a solid move in alleviating security concerns.
While Amazon.com has been the early leader in generating revenues from HaaS, AMR noted that smaller players focused on the market have made significant inroads “despite the presence of giants such as IBM and Microsoft.” Other companies expected to be players in the burgeoning space include Cloudera, Datameer, Hortonworks, MAPR Technologies, Emc, Morta Data and Altiscale.
A number of wireless operators have jumped onto the Hadoop platform, looking to tap into the technology’s ability to collect, store and process large volumes of information as they tackle big data challenges.
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