The January 2016 edition of the 451 Research Data Platforms Map is now available for download.

Initially designed to illustrate the complexity of the data platforms market, the latest version includes an updated index to help you navigate the complex array of current data platform providers.

There are numerous additions compared to the previous map, especially in the area of event/stream processing while we have also reconsidered our approach to Hadoop-as-a-service, narrowing it down to distinct Hadoop offerings rather than hosted Hadoop distributions.

We have also tried to clean up or approach to the convergence of Hadoop and search, although that remains a bit of a work in progress, to be honest. There’s also something in there for eagle-eyed Silicon Valley fans.

You can use this map to:

• compare capabilities, offerings, and functionality.
• understand where providers intersect and diverge.
• identify shortlists of choices to suit enterprise needs.

The latest version of the map can be downloaded here.

What are the major shortcomings of Hadoop? The answer to that questions looks set to shape the future development roadmap for the open source data processing framework, which is why it is one of the major questions being asked as part of our 451 Research 2013 Hadoop survey.

The limitations of Hadoop have been widely reported over the years, but as the Apache Hadoop community and related vendors have responded to issues such as reliability and high availability – not least via the now generally available Apache Hadoop 2 – so attention turns to other areas such as security, administration and performance, as well as more advanced functionality requirements, including graph processing, stream processing, improved SQL support and virtualization support.

The list of potential improvements is therefore fairly long, and as we near the end of our survey it is interesting to see that the list of key advances respondents are looking for in order to increase adoption of Hadoop is fairly widespread.

So far the responses to our Hadoop survey suggest administration tooling and performance top the list, followed by reliability, SQL support and backup and recovery, but development tools and authentication and access control are not far behind.

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