Despite ‘overhype,’ market still upbeat on big data vendors

By Digital News Asia February 12, 2013

Ovum analyzed data gathered by DataSift, which ranked Twitter mentions and sentiment
Big data became a business, not just a technology, story in 2012

Despite ‘overhype,’ market still upbeat on big data vendors SENTIMENT surrounding big data vendors remained positive last year, despite skeptics’ suggestions that the subject had been ‘over-hyped’, according to analyst firm Ovum.

The big data buzzword even managed to transcend the enterprise IT world to become a hot topic for business publications and journals in 2012, with MongoDB claiming considerable mindshare among web developers who traditionally relied on MySQL.

In a new research note, Ovum analyzed data gathered by DataSift, which ranked Twitter mentions and sentiment of vendors (and open source organizations) associated with the big data market in 2012.

The global analysts were surprised to find that while Hadoop garners much of the spotlight as a big data platform, the vendor 10gen, which develops MongoDB, came in second in mentions to Apache, which hosts the Hadoop project.

“Given the level of build-up and suggested hype, it surprised us that sentiment expressed about big data vendors still remained so positive in 2012,” said Tony Baer, principal analyst for Ovum.

“What’s also interesting is the degree to which big data became a business, not just a technology story in 2012,” said Baer, stating that some business portals, such as Forbes and Harvard Business Review, edged out popular IT news portals in terms of coverage of this traditionally ‘techie’ subject.

While positive mentions of big data vendors outnumbered negative mentions by 3:1, negative sentiment spiked in November with headlines over HP’s troubled acquisition of Autonomy. Not surprisingly, given that vendors accelerated the pace of product announcements during 2012, 60% of Twitter activity occurred in the second half of the year.

The Twitter data provided a good glimpse into vendor brand recognition with Big Data. 10gen, which develops the popular MongoDB document-oriented NoSQL database, scored high in mentions, trailing only the Apache Foundation.

Others such as IBM and Teradata were also well represented in the Twitter stream, trailing only behind Apache and 10gen in positive mentions.

Splunk, which is associated with machine data and, like 10gen, is also popular among developers, also scored high, showing that there is growing awareness about harnessing ‘the Internet of things’ to generate business insights.

“While Twitter streams are not a scientific focus group for detecting brand awareness, they provide a valuable window on market thinking,” said Baer.

“The data showed that while some players, such as IBM and Teradata, successfully scored high recognition in Twitter mentions, other enterprise players need to better focus their message to get big data recognition.”

Ovum’s big data research stream is tackling the emergence of the vendor ecosystem along with the issues pertinent to integrating big data with mainstream enterprises, the analyst firm said in a statement.

Encompassing issues such as technology selection, data stewardship, infrastructure management practices, and skills, its research portfolio will help enterprises focus on managing the information assets of the business, and applying analytics to create business value and insight.