A new Jaspersoft survey suggests that companies are turning to Hadoop in order to wrangle with a massive flood of data. Specifically, some 59 percent of the 600 community members surveyed by Jaspersoft said they either deployed Hadoop as part of a “Big Data” project or were developing a role for it within their organizations. Hadoop, an open-source project launched by the Apache Foundation, is designed to crunch massive amounts of data—a property that has made it popular among large tech companies such as Facebook and IBM. Some 63 percent of Hadoop users were application developers, according to the survey, while 15 percent were B.I. report developers and 10 percent were either B.I. administrators or “casual business users.” Hadoop HDFS and HBase remain the most popular Big Data stores for companies’ analysis projects, followed closely by MongoDB and Hive. The bulk of respondents—64 percent—consider reports the most important data-analytics technology at their disposal, followed closely by data visualization (55 percent) and statistical/predictive analytics (55 percent). Meanwhile, relationship discovery/relationship graph analysis and sentiment analysis ranked at the bottom of those analytics technologies considered most important, with 36 percent and 19 percent, respectively.

Data Sources

Of those respondents who said machine-generated content was a source for their Big Data project, around 53 percent indicated that content came from Web logs, followed by 33 percent who said that mobile devices were a key source. Sensor data (26 percent), photos/pictures (22 percent), and RFID tags (18 percent) rounded out that top five. Some 20 percent indicated that machine-generated content was “not a source” for their Big Data project. Fewer respondents relied on human-generated text for their Big Data project, with 42 percent indicating it wasn’t a source. Of the remainder, 33 percent of that data came from Facebook, followed by 27 percent from forums/interest groups, 25 percent from blogs, and 24 percent from online news/media, and 23 percent from Twitter. Around 36 percent of companies reported that a “funded business initiative” motivated their Big Data project, followed by 33 percent who said “proof-of-concept” and 26 percent opting for “general research.” In all, 14 percent of respondents indicated that they had already deployed some sort of analytics solution, with another 45 percent stating that such a platform was “currently in deployment.” Another 23 percent had a project planned for sometime within the next 12 months, and 18 percent indicated a planned project within six months.

The Broader Market

Jaspersoft’s findings align with broader industry trends. Hadoop is indeed popular, with a variety of companies (including Jaspersoft, Cloudera and others) offering some sort of analytics solution involving the framework. On top of that, a wide variety of vendors—from tiny startups to tech giants such as IBM—are offering analytics solutions that emphasize easy-to-read reports and data visualization. Many of those solutions also place a good deal of weight on human-generated data from social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. If anything, the most surprising thing about the Jaspersoft survey could be the lack of surprises. But for any IT firm investing a lot of money and effort in developing a Hadoop platform, or a business-intelligence platform with an emphasis on visualization, these sorts of surveys must be comforting.   Image: Andrey Smirnov/Shutterstock.com