Big Data: From Promise to Reality

When I began covering the Big Data market for Wikibon back in early 2011, it was early days. Big Data technologies such as Hadoop and NoSQL, while still early in their development, were becoming better known by enterprise practitioners. The market for commercial Big Data technologies and services was small but on the verge of rapid growth. But from a business use case perspective, Big Data was long on promise but short on specifics.

A lot has changed over the last four years. Without question, Big Data technologies have developed at breakneck speed due in large part to a vibrant open source community of developers. Hadoop in particular has taken great strides. What was once a batch processing, unsecure and somewhat finicky framework is now a much more comprehensive, enterprise-grade, multi-application supporting Big Data platform.