History indicates that the most innovation will come from companies engineering entirely new ways to solve the most difficult problems faster, easier and/or cheaper.
Big data’s little secret: Hadoop isn’t the end-all-be-all
In summary, the “secret” of Big Data is that today it suffers from a dearth of expertise, so the majority of the revenue is coming from a services centric approach combined with open source technologies. I am in no way diminishing the importance and value of open source projects like Hadoop. To the contrary, I’m a huge supporter, always have been.
What I’m pointing out is that the market will evolve beyond an open source, services-driven revenue model when companies begin developing highly disruptive technologies that solve the hardest problems of big data. While open source solutions like those from Apache may play a role in this, history indicates that the most innovation will come from companies engineering entirely new ways to solve the most difficult problems.
The Data Juice 