Reality Check On The Promise Of Hadoop

Evidence continues to build that today’s data challenges – and tomorrow’s – will not be solved with yesterday’s solutions – traditional relational databases.

Pure-play Hadoop vendors have long been viewed in the market as key next-generation providers for data analytics. But when I talk to customers, it seems all I hear about are the shortcomings of Hadoop. With promises of minimizing data silos with the concept of a Data Lake, Hadoop has failed in its ability to consider the operational side of data and what it takes to actually run a business.

Hadoop Fails the Database Test

Over the past seven years, Hadoop has been billed as a platform for storing and analyzing data. I’d argue it’s really a file system. Hadoop vendors are adding a thin layer of database capability above the Hadoop core, but that’s resulting in products that are too database light to be effectively used as a database. Meanwhile the lack of data security, lineage and governance is leaving the data lakes largely unusable in the enterprise.

MarkLogic can work with it, but on its own, Hadoop isn’t sufficient to integrate data in silos. An interesting observation – in various analyst reports for analytic solutions, the position of leading open-source players is relatively stagnant. MarkLogic’s core value proposition is reflected best as it relates to the operational database market as a whole. Additionally, we were placed as the only visionary in the recently published Gartner Magic Quadrant for Data Management Solutions for Analytics. To me, this signals a clear reality check on the Hadoop market.

Unfortunately, this does not bode well for enterprises. They face an ever-growing need to extract intelligence and actionable information out of the mountains of data they’re now collecting – and outdated tools are incapable of meeting the challenge. Hadoop vendors haven’t produced a solution and relational database technology, the thirty-year-old workhorse of the database industry, was not designed to solve the data silo problems facing the enterprise today.

The industry requires a new solution and we’re in the sweet spot. We are focused on the future of the modern database and have a proven track record of execution with emphasis on the key challenges facing enterprises: how to bring together silos of data to make that data useful.

The database market is going through a fundamental shift requiring ubiquitous access to information so that it can be operationalized. And, MarkLogic’s next generation solution that enables integrating data silos without the need for traditional Extract-Transform-Load (ETL) processes drives the data agility customers require. The other factor is the introduction of cloud computing — which is changing the game for many traditional IT organizations and it’s driving an unprecedented requirement for data security. This represents a change in the security landscape that will ultimately trump the billions of dollars being spent on network security.

MarkLogic is targeting both cloud computing and data security — our near-term release of MarkLogic 9 will provide customers the data security they’ve been dreaming of and fulfill our strategy to allow customers to build an application once and run it anywhere supports cloud neutrality, which will be a necessary characteristic of every cloud strategy.

We will continue to deliver on our next generation database and search technology to offer a full solution to enable enterprises to better analyze, manage, search, secure and use data to achieve real business outcomes.

Gartner Magic Quadrant for Data Management Solutions for Analytics, by Roxane Edjlali, Adam Ronthal, Rick Greenwald, Mark A. Beyer, Donald Feinberg February 20, 2017

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