Mid Tier Consultant Sees Ripples of Opportunity in Data Lakes

December 16, 2015

I love predictions from mid tier consultants. One can spot what these folks will be pitching to their customers. One can also see the buzzwords likely to replace plain talk in their reports.

A good example of this type of forecasting—which if it worked would be used to pick horse race winners, not technologies—appears in “Big Data’s Future According to Ovum.” To spare extra wear and tear on your rapidly beating heart, SQL data management will remain popular but nothing will capture the excitement of Hadoop on Spark or is it Spark in Hadoop? Oh, well.

Here’s the passage I found as chilling as a dip in the lake near my shack in rural Kentucky:

Ovum’s other big prediction for 2016 is for data lake adoption to become a “front-burner issue” for mature Hadoop adopters that have already successfully put analytics into production serving multiple lines of business and stakeholder groups across the organization. The result will be a new demand for tools to govern the data lake and make it more transparent. Ovum expects significant growth in tooling that builds on emerging data lineage capabilities to catalogue, protect, govern access, tier storage, and manage the lifecycle of data stored in data lakes.

The word for 2016 will involve govern as in “governance.” The idea is that once folks dump stuff in the lake, a digital and procedural mechanism will be needed to figure out exactly what’s in the lake.

Wow, mid tier consulting pitching the need for management. I wonder if the mid tier consulting firms are able to sell their clients management consulting services?

I think this means that these predictions and the attendant reports are essentially content marketing exercises. That’s okay, but writing about a problem is exactly the same as solving a problem. Right?

How did that work out when search was the topic of the moment?

Stephen E Arnold, December 16, 2015

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