7 Hadoop questions. Q3: Hadoop responsibility

Who is responsible for managing Hadoop clusters within your organisation? That’s one of the primary questions being asked in the 451 Research 2013 Hadoop survey.

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While many organisations are adopting or evaluating Hadoop, our research to date indicates that much of that adoption is tactical rather than strategic at this stage.

As such much of the adoption is led by functional business units (particularly the marketing department), rather than the central IT organisation.

However, as adoption of Hadoop grows, we increasingly see central IT departments looking to standardise their approach to Hadoop with reference configurations and strategic relationships with key suppliers.

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The early responses to our Hadoop survey are therefore interesting: so far a higher proportion of respondents indicate that the central IT department is (or will be in the case of those in the process of adoption) responsible for managing Hadoop clusters within their organisation.

This is quite surprising to us. We’ll have to dig into the results to evaluate properly once the survey closes, but interestingly the early results show that the proportion indicating that the central IT department is/will be responsible for managing Hadoop is significantly higher among respondents that are still in the process of evaluating and deploying Hadoop, compared to those that already have deployments up and running.

This would suggest that the next generation of Hadoop adopters are taking a more strategic view of the data processing platform.

To give your view on this and other questions related to the adoption of Hadoop, please take our 451 Research 2013 Hadoop survey.