Saturday, November 24, 2012

The big data hype cycle 2012

I haven't written in the last few days,  I have been in EU project review (as a reviewer) in Brussels and also had some time to be tourist, and climbed the Atomium, Brussels known icon

and  in several museums in center city, taking refuge from the rain 

  including the famous Magritte museum.   I have imported some Belgian chocolate (most of it was already given away)  and a Belgian virus, with whom I am struggling in the last couple of days.

I also came across the Gartner's big data hype cycle for 2012 -- the first time in which Gartner chose to look at big data as an area.


You may notice that "complex event processing" is around the peak of the diagram.

It seems that this hype cycle made Irfan Khan, CTO of Sybase quite furious, his firm reaction was:
"Gartner dead wrong about Big Data life-cycle".    Khan claims that Big Data is not a hype but a reality, and expectations are under-inflated not over-inflated since it can do much more than what people assume.

I guess that there is growing adoption to technologies associated with Big Data, but I don't think that it reached the plateau of productivity, as Khan's claims,  since this is not around whether there are mature products (by the vendors' conception), but around the utilization in industry, and it is difficult to say that most organizations had good exploitation of such technologies.  Furthermore, Khan's claim that Big Data is under-inflated actually shows that the plateau of productivity has been reached.   

In any event,  the event processing angle is interesting.  Note that originally event processing appeared in the hype cycle of enterprise architecture for several years.  In 2012 event processing does not appear explicitly, 
Big Data appears as one block in the top.  This shows that event processing has migrated (at least in Gartner's mind) from the middleware world into the analytics world,  and this is also compatible  with some of the current trends, but this should be a subject of another posting - coming soon.