My big data predictions for 2015:

  1. Big data will continue to fail to deliver for most companies.
    This has several reasons, including in particular: 1: lack of data to analyze that actually benefits from big data tools and approaches (and which is not better analyzed with traditional tools). 2: lack of talent, and failure to attract analytics talent. 3: stuck in old IT, and too inflexible to allow using modern tools (if you want to use big data, you will need a flexible “in-house development” type of IT that can install tools, try them, abandon them, without going up and down the management chains) 4: too much marketing. As long as big data is being run by the marketing department, not by developers, it will fail.
  2. Project consolidation: we have seen hundreds of big data software projects the last years. Plenty of them on Apache, too. But the current state is a mess, there is massive redundancy, and lots and lots of projects are more-or-less abandoned. Cloudera ML, for example, is dead: superseded by Oryx and Oryx 2. More projects will be abandoned, because we have way too many (including much too many NoSQL databases, that fail to outperform SQL solutions like PostgreSQL). As is, we have dozens of competing NoSQL databases, dozens of competing ML tools, dozens of everything.
  3. Hype: the hype will continue, but eventually (when there is too much negative press on the term “big data” due to failed projects and inflated expectations) move on to other terms. The same is also happening to “data science”, so I guess the next will be “big analytics”, “big intelligence” or something like that.
  4. Less openness: we have seen lots of open-source projects. However, many decided to go with Apache-style licensing - always ready to close down their sharing, and no longer share their development. In 2015, we’ll see this happen more often, as companies try to make money off their reputation. At some point, copyleft licenses like GPL may return to popularity due to this.