Hortonworks' Dataflow is meant to support both the Internet of Things as well as the application-to-application analytics that traditional stream processors underpin. More broadly, stream processors are becoming core functionality the complements the more familiar batch processing engines such as Hive, HBase, or Impala. Applications that need near real-time functionality have to evaluate stream processors as core parts of their application design patterns. CIO's and CTO's now have to choose a Hadoop platform vendor as part of a more strategic, long-term partnership than ever before. New functionality is splintering the Hadoop ecosystem and customers don't really have second source options with different Hadoop distributions. We are now reentering the territory of the proprietary flavors of Unix in the '90s.

The markets and ecosystems around Structured and Unstructured application platforms are rapidly evolving. IT organizations have many choices and one architecture will not fit every company. Wikibon looks at leading platforms and the alignment of customer needs with platform capabilities.

Hadoop is one of the most innovative ecosystems the industry has ever seen. But fragmentation and complexity are the trade-offs of all this rapid evolution while the platform is still maturing. Choice has a cost. This research report has only examined the compute engines that process data. But the fragmentation in management, governance, and security tools is just as great. There is a continually expanding array of tools such as Oozie, Falcon, Atlas, Knox, Ranger, HDFS DARE, Ambari, Hue, Sentry, Sahara, Cloudera Manager and Navigator, and Zookeeper. At some point it makes sense for customers to consider investing in a tool that can hide much of that complexity. To be clear, there is no magic product that can hide all these technologies. But when customers take the perspective of simplifying an end-to-end process, solutions are available to address the problem.

A companion piece to Wikibon's Public Cloud Market Forecast 2015-2026, this research examines the revenue from SaaS, IaaS and PaaS vendors. The competitive environment surrounding the Public Cloud is in flux. SaaS remains turbulent with new entrants successfully gaining share and incumbent licensed software providers trying to develop SaaS offerings and reclaim leadership positions they have maintained for a decade or more. The IaaS segment leadership is beginning to crystalize as a function of scale, but PaaS is just formulating and finding its way. As such, enterprises need to be wary of which providers are winning and losing (and where), but more importantly what they themselves intend to accomplish with Public Cloud.

VMworld has grown to be one of the largest and most important technology industry events. Wikibon has attended this event for many years and will have its largest presence this year as part of a double-set of theCUBE. Coverage will examine the broad and diverse ecosystem including storage, cloud, networking and much more.