Data Lakes will replace EDWs - a prediction

Over the last few years there has been a trend of increased spending on BI, and that trend isn't going away.  The analyst predictions however have, understandably, been based on the mentality that the choice was between a traditional EDW/DW model or Hadoop.  With the new 'Business Data Lake' type of hybrid approach its pretty clear that the shift is underway for all vendors to have a hybrid approach rather than a simple choice between Hadoop or a Data Warehouse.  So taking the average of a few analysts figures we get a graph that looks like this

In other words 12 months ago there was no real prediction at hybrid architectures. Now however we see SAP talking about hybrid, IBM about DB2 and Hadoop and Teradata doing the same. This means we need to think about what that means.  What it means is that we'll see a switch between Traditional approaches and hybrid Data Lake centric architectures that will start now and accelerate rapidly.

My prediction therefore is that these Hybrid Data Lake architectures will rapidly become the 'new normal' in enterprise computing.  There will still be more people taking traditional approaches this year and next but the choice for people looking at this is whether they want to get on the old bus or the new bus.  This for me is analogous to what we saw around proprietary EAI against Java based EAI around the turn of the century.  People who chose the old school found themselves in a very bad place once the switch had happened.

What I'm also predicting is we will see a drop rather than a gain in 'pure' Hadoop projects as people look to incorporate Hadoop as a core part of an architecture rather than standalone HDFS silos.