Top 8 trends in big data for 2016

Here at Tableau, we love to think about data and we love to think big. So what could be better than sharing our thoughts on big data? (I promise that is the last pun of this blog post). But in all seriousness, we’re focused on helping you see and understand all of your data, which is why we step back and reflect on key trends every year.

Big data is an interesting and quickly-evolving space. Customers appear to be mixing and matching multiple solutions based on their analytics needs instead of settling for a one-size-fits-all.

I want to point out two of the trends that at first appear to be at odds. But in reality, they both point to this new, modern analytics stack that companies are adopting.

In a recent survey of 2,200 Hadoop customers, only 3 percent of respondents said they anticipate doing less with Hadoop in the next year. And 76 percent of those who already use Hadoop plan on doing more within the next three months. Almost half of the companies that haven’t deployed Hadoop say they will do so within the next year.

The same survey also found Tableau to be the leading BI tool for companies using or planning to use Hadoop, as well as those furthest along in Hadoop maturity.

The “death” of the data warehouse has been overhyped for some time now, but it’s no secret that growth in this segment of the market has been slowing. But we now see a major shift in the application of this technology to the cloud where Amazon led the way with an on-demand cloud-data warehouse in Redshift.

Redshift, AWS’s fastest-growing service, now has competition from Google with BigQuery, and offerings from longtime data warehouse power players like Microsoft (with Azure SQL Data Warehouse) and Teradata. There are also new startups like Snowflake (the winner of Strata + Hadoop World 2015 Startup Showcase) gaining adoption in this space.

According to analysts, 90 percent of companies who have adopted Hadoop will also keep their data warehouses. And with these new cloud offerings, those customers can dynamically scale up or down the amount of storage and compute resources in the data warehouse relative to the larger amounts of information stored in their Hadoop data lake.

Those are just two of the eight notable trends. See all of them here:

And check out our top 10 trends in business intelligence for 2016.

Which trends speak to you? Have one of your own to add? Share your thoughts in the comments below or on Twitter using the hashtag #datatrends16.