News

Ovum Study: Big Data Retains Popularity

• By David Ramel
• January 24, 2013

Analyst firm Ovum this week released research indicating sentiment about Big Data vendors remained positive in 2012 among Web developers and others.

Rather than being "over-hyped," as some skeptics have suggested, the London-based Ovum reported that Big Data's popularity has even grown into new arenas, and Big Data vendors are encroaching upon the turf of more traditional database vendors.

"The Big Data buzz word even managed to transcend from the enterprise IT world to become a hot topic for business publications and journals in 2012, with MongoDB [developed by the company 10gen] claiming considerable mindshare among Web developers who traditionally relied on MySQL," Ovum said in a news release.

Interestingly, Ovum's research note was based on the Big Data technique of culling social media information. The data came from the company DataSift, which studied 2012 Twitter traffic to gauge vendor sentiment and brand recognition.

"By restricting the search to vendors, the analysis focused on perception of the Big Data market, as opposed to the perception of Big Data among the general public," said Ovum principal analyst Tony Baer. "In all, the analysis reflected 2.2 million Twitter interactions from more than 981,000 authors."

The study might have special significance to developers. "The popularity of the 10gen brand is attributable to the fact that MongoDB has become for Web developers the document equivalent of MySQL," Baer said. "It is open source, built in a language (JavaScript) that is highly popular among Web developers, and relatively simple to develop."

Baer said that Ovum believes 10gen's popularity speaks more the future of Web development rather than the future of Big Data.

"We view 10gen as becoming the non-transactional database successor to MySQL in the world of Web developers," Baer said.

After Apache, with 9.4 percent of Twitter posts, and 10gen, with 6.2 percent, came: IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Teradata, Splunk, Oracle, Cloudera, Amazon, DataSift, SAP and Hortonworks.

Baer noted that not all of the Big Data sentiment was positive, with negative mentions peaking in November, when headlines prevailed concerning the problematic acquisition of the British software company Autonomy Corp. by Hewlett-Packard.

However, he implied that the DataSift study itself was an endorsement of Big Data techniques. "The data provided by DataSift provides a good example of how social media mining provides a useful snapshot of popular thinking that supplements--or replaces--the traditional role of marketing focus groups."