What the Cloud and Hadoop Mean for Big Data in 2014

The relationship between the cloud and Big Data is growing closer than ever, and handling data produced in the cloud will be vital to the success of Big Data technologies in the future. That, among other things having to do with Hadoop, the cloud and the enterprise, is what Talend, the open source Big Data vendor, is saying in its assessment of where the channel is headed in the new year.

That the cloud is important to Big Data has been clear for some time now, since Big Data infrastructure often lives in the cloud. But the relationship between these two parts of the channel is set to assume a new dimension, Talend says, as the cloud becomes increasingly important not just for hosting data, but for helping to produce it through the myriad other applications running in the cloud. That means "enterprises should build a big data infrastructure that is comprehensive in the data sources it taps" in order to ensure their ability to derive value from data produced in the cloud, according to the company.

Other emerging trends in the Big Data world include the maturity of Hadoop, which in the view of Talend executives has attained "platform status." That means it "has become a true enterprise computing platform, able to run all kinds of concurrent workloads, ranging in latency from batch to real-time."

And partially because of Hadoop's growth into a dynamic platform that can handle a wide range of data tasks, it is now about much more than analyzing data in traditional ways. Going forward, Talend says, the enterprises that will derive the greatest value from Hadoop and other Big Data technologies will be those that use it in contexts like customer behavior and risk analysis, parsing information to make decisions on the fly and drive operations.

In Talend's view, these trends mean that the hype surrounding Big Data in 2013 — and there was plenty of it — was justified. Now that Big Data concepts and tools have reached maturity, they have entered widespread use in many organizations, with the promise of new types of data-driven innovations yet to come.