On the one hand, you have this view: “Big Data Adoption A Big Headache For Some Companies” (thanks to my friend Jeff for pointing this out). The reservations are summarized in the cartoon: it takes highly valuable and rare skills, the overall expenses are significant, and management’s expectations may be too high.
However, this quote from Mike Tuchen, chief executive of Talend, made my tweet about it quite popular.
“Once a developer learns how to work with Hadoop and (other Big Data software) then their salary doubles, so it gets to be relatively unaffordable for a smaller company,” he said. “Bigger companies not only can afford that, but they also can take their time to train their existing developers, and they are willing to make that investment.”
In fact, every negative on the list may be viewed as positive. For example, there is nothing wrong about high expectations, if you can deliver.
On the other hand, Forbes leaves no doubt that Hadoop is ready for the enterprise and lists five reasons why it is so: latest version is very fast, data is growing, best practices are here, many companies support it (of course Elephant Scale is one – just kidding), and there are hosts of open source developers. So stopping Hadoop is like stopping Linux.
Who is right? Both, or course, have their points.