Up, Up And Up of Hadoop's Future

The onset of Digital Architectures in enterprise businesses implies the ability to drive continuous online interactions with global consumers/customers/clients or patients. The goal is not just to provide engaging visualization but also to personalize services customers care about while working across multiple channels/modes of interaction. Mobile applications first began forcing the need for enterprise applications to support multiple channels of interaction with their consumers. For example, Banking now requires an ability to engage consumers in a seamless experience across an average of four to five channels Mobile, eBanking, Call Center, Kiosk etc. Healthcare is a close second where caregivers expect patient, medication & disease data at their fingertips with a few finger swipes on an iPad app. Big Data technology evolved to overcome the limitations of existing data approaches (RDBMS & EDW)  to keep up data architecture & analysis challenges inherent in the Digital application stack.

Big Data is backed by the open source community with most Hadoop ecosystem technology (25+ projects) incubated, developed and maintained in the Apache ecosystem. The Open Source community is inherently Darwinian in nature.  Its focus on code quality, industry adoption, a concrete roadmap, and committers means that If a project lacks then it is for sure headed for the graveyard.

The Big Data ecosystem and Hadoop technology provide mature, stable and feature-rich platforms for global vertical organizations to implement complex Digital projects. However, the technology maturity is only a necessary factor. The ability of the organization in terms of an innovation-oriented mindset is key in driving internal change. So is inculcating a learning mindset across business leadership, IT teams, internal domain experts, and management. The universal maxim – “one gets only out of something as much as they put into it”  is truer than ever with Big Data. While it is easy to blame a technology or a vendor or lack of skilled personnel for perceived project failures, one should guard against a status quo-ist mindset. You can rest assured that your competition is not sitting still.