Techaisle forecasts that US SMB IT spend growth rate could very well remain flat at US$188 billion in 2016 as compared to 2015. However, the US midmarket spending growth will likely increase by 6% whereas the small business spending will fall by 2 percent in 2016 from 2015. In early 2015, Techaisle had forecast US SMB IT spending to be US$180B by end of 2015 – based on most recent Techaisle SMB surveys the actual spending for 2015 came in at US$188B. Techaisle survey data shows some very interesting patterns for planned SMB 2016 IT budgets across different employee size businesses. Small businesses show progressive fall in IT budgets until they reach a certain size whereas midmarket businesses show budget increases until they reach a certain size.
Techaisle Blog
Hortonworks is a 100 percent open source company, in direct contrast to Cloudera, and every presentation and conversation during its first ever analyst day reinforced its unwavering commitment to open source. In a very short period of time it has come a long way as a software product company with a vision “to manage the world’s data” – data-at-rest, data-in-motion, modern data applications. It wants to enable next generation data architecture by innovating the core, to be used for any delivery model and for all data.
Hortonworks has made great strides in the last couple of years – has 800+ subscription customers and plans to add 100-150 customers per quarter; has 1600 partners which it is trying to educate, mentor and support; its community connection has 3000+ members with 11,000+ weekly visitors; and is a founding member of ODPi (open ecosystem of big data).
The trio – Cloudera, Hortonworks, MapR - are in premium because they are the pioneers in the space and businesses engage with them because of their technology leadership. But short-term advantages do not count any more. By being a public company Hortonworks has declared longevity and it can no longer be judged by having a first-mover advantage. At this stage of the company it is important to design a go-to-market business model architecture that meets the demands of modern businesses. Although Hortonworks heart and comfort zone is in technology product road map it is pivoting very well to “strike conversations with business executives” to deliver the business perspectives that they need.
Hortonwoks has grand plans for technological leadership which it hopes will increase its market share, and divert most big data purchase conversation to its transparent open source subscription model. However, it will be a long, tedious and arduous effort. Hortonworks has both awareness and reach issues. A large percentage of the midmarket and lower-enterprise businesses as well as partners that Techaisle interacts with begin their big data solution selection process with either large IT vendors or smaller consulting organizations. In Techaisle’s most recent US midmarket big data & analytics adoption survey, although 30 percent of businesses are currently either piloting or implementing a big data project and another 50 percent are planning to deploy, neither Hortonworks (nor Cloudera) are top of mind big data suppliers. The top of mind suppliers are IBM, HP, Microsoft, Dell, Oracle and Accenture – in that order. A typical door-to-door selling motion of Hortonworks may not help when the share of installed base and partner ecosystem is lower than its most dominant competitor. In its defense Hortonworks quickly points out that it has no competition because it is the only open-source company. It is certainly a difficult task and Hortonworks is building its partner program to alleviate and augment reach and sales.
The average spending on big data by midmarket customers is growing. As per Techaisle’s big data adoption trends study of last two years, the average spending has jumped from US$28,900 to US$56,600, a 96 percent increase. 53 percent of midmarket big data adopters are exploring Hadoop ecosystem including analytical database and less than 1/5th are working with NoSQL databases.
One of the top gripes of the midmarket and lower-enterprise businesses is that the sales personnel of big data companies “talk about features and who has more committers”. Instead these businesses want to know & learn how their offerings solve customer problems. To this Hortonworks has a perfect and differentiated response. It has developed a cheat sheet with two different tracks (Hortonworks calls them swim lanes) – one focused on customers that are at the cutting-edge of big data adoption and analytics and the other that are just beginning their journey and are focused on transforming their data into analytics projects. And to Hortonworks credit it has generated several powerful case studies for most business problem scenarios. These scenarios are clearly outlined in the “swim lanes” cheat sheet in a bee-hive like matrix which is easy to understand, manage and translate. This is definitely a step in the right direction for sales conversations.
There is no doubt about Hortonworks technical capability. At the analyst event Hortonworks launched its connected data platform that connects data-at-rest to data-in-motion - powered by Apache NiFi, the connected data platform acts as the bridge between Hortonworks Data Platform and Hortonworks Data Flow. It fast tracks getting data into Hadoop.
Spark is the new reality and Hortonworks understands the dynamics and the pressures. Hortonworks plans to bring enterprise Spark at scale and is rolling out Apache Spark 1.6 with faster Spark streaming, dataset APIs and automatic memory tuning. Its new Apache Ambari 2.2 provides a single pane of glass for all core services, enables express upgrades to update clusters and has new integrated SmartSense technology with nearly 250 recommendations to optimize cluster performance & availability.
But challenges are plenty. Viability of open source ecosystem is based on top talent working on hard problems and the talent is migrating to Spark rather than Hadoop. Given this vulnerability Hortonworks must find ways to remain on their good side. To address the potential issues, it has begun to curate, nurture and employ committers. But Hortonworks biggest challenge will be to show thought leadership that answers questions on the direction of open source and the dynamics of open source business model.
Hadoop is still an alien term within the business (as opposed to IT) world. It has a Unix problem. Unix was the next best thing in 1990s but developers and users did not have expertise to make it mainstream. It took Unix 9-10 years to establish itself, helped generously by education from HP, IBM, and Sun. In the same vein Hortonworks has three critical challenges – 1/ sales must educate and motivate business users to embrace Hadoop keeping Hortonworks brand front-and-center, 2/ marketing must explain its ecosystem dynamics to the end-customer, 3/ devops is at the core of an enterprise development, Hortonworks must provide thought leadership in this area.
Kudos to Hortonworks for creating a visible roadmap architecture consisting of open source components - NiFi for data ingestion, Spark for transformation, Hive for queries and Zeppelin for dashboards - that when tied together can deliver end-to-end big data solutions. However, it is a palette of moving parts, which creates a decision inertia within the end-customers, as they have to understand all vulnerabilities, trade-offs and compatibility issues. When there is a closed system, all components can be managed, but in an open system the effort is dependent upon the participation and loyalty of the community and the larger ecosystem. So far, Hortonworks engineering group’s management of the dynamics of the developer community is great, in fact, creating and maintaining an ecosystem has been an enlightened philanthropy.
Hortonworks’ product evolution direction looks similar to Oracle from 20 years back – database, applications, middleware - and Hortonworks agrees. In modern ecosystem, Hortonworks success will be dependent upon how it is able to sell its projects to the community and have them contribute their free time. Just like VHS and Betamax, which gets adopted is dependent upon talent.
It is time for Hortonworks to over-play, over-announce and over-market its ecosystem dynamics. In the meantime businesses in the market for evaluating big data solutions must check out Hortonworks sandbox – an easy way to get started.
It is here. Techaisle's 2016 Top 10 SMB and Midmarket IT Priorities, Business Issues and IT Challenges.
Techaisle's recently completed survey of SMBs and Mid-market companies reveals the following Top 10 IT Priorities, IT Challenges and Business Issues that the IT and Business Decision makers are facing in 2016. In its detailed global SMB and Midmarket survey Techaisle investigated 14 different technology areas and a lot more sub-technologies, 19 different IT challenges and 19 different business issues.
2016 Top 10 SMB Business Issues, IT Challenges, IT Priorities
2016 Top 10 Mid-Market Business Issues, IT Priorities, IT Challenges
This is a two part blog article. The first part, published earlier, reviewed the predictions we made for 2015 and the second part, below, focuses on outlook for 2016 and for the longer term (2017 - 2020).
Top 10 Predictions for Year 2016
1. 2016 will see even more intense emphasis on “CIA-Plus”
IT Suppliers will begin to align their offerings with Cloud, IoT, and/or Analytics; products that do not address end-user needs in these areas will be positioned as infrastructure and integration services needed to capitalize on these technologies. This trend, like hybrid IT, will continue into 2017. In 2016, Cloud and Analytics will remain among the top five IT priorities of SMBs and midmarket businesses. IoT will inch its way up into the priority list, though adoption will remain limited.
2. Rise of IoT will be constrained by a lack of real-world examples
From a buy-side perspective, the rise of IoT will need to be fueled by real-world examples showing the benefits of automating tasks and processes within IT and in other sectors. Within the SMB community, we expect sporadic implementation and a lack of concerted effort towards creation of IoT strategy, even though IT suppliers will continue to push forward their solutions hoping to remain top-of-mind in order to claim leadership in this emerging space. Each IT supplier will create its own solution set causing decision and adoption inertia, despite the wave of innovation that we expect to see emerge from the smaller & more agile IoT providers that are able to more easily align IT expertise with real life solutions. Experienced consultants and system integrators in particular will hold sway in matching SMB adopters with suppliers.
3. IoT supplier success will be determined by ecosystem management
On the sell side, the rise of IoT will be accompanied by an intense wave of interest in ecosystem management. It is difficult to buy or sell a “box of IoT”, though providers will claim to provide complete solutions. Parenthetically, this constraint is not limited to IoT. While it is possible to sell a “box of cloud” under the right circumstances, only AWS really manages to do so. And while one can sell a “box of analytics”, the boxes themselves come in a lot of different shapes and sizes. To meet SMB and enterprise buy-side demand for IoT, sellers will assemble coalitions that provide the many products and services that comprise an IoT solution. This will make alliance management a key success factor in the marketplace. The last time alliances determined market leadership; SAP became the global standard in ERP. Niche value added reseller may find a new source of success in IoT.
4. Business transformation will continue to elude analytics users
Analytics users will find that they are not achieving the expected benefits, prompting divergent responses. Some SMBs will find that analytics has not been transformative, and will blame the technology; others will look to move past descriptive and diagnostic views, piloting predictive or prescriptive initiatives. One of these responses is clearly more sensible than the other, but that does not mean it will be universal, at least in 2016. Focus on visualization will increase (mine is better than yours), on how the technology can solve business issues and challenges for SMBs and midmarket customers. Simplified implementation of customer and social analytics will be key drivers of adoption.
5. “Hybrid” will be used more often in conjunction with “IT” than “cloud”
User organizations will accept the notion that their focus on cloud needs to evolve into a focus on hybrid IT, as firms realize that their platforms and management scope must encompass on and off-premise systems. Truthfully, there is still a lot of work to do in cloud adoption. But the nature of the discussion has changed from “what and how do we move to the cloud?” to “what do we do to build an integrated, manageable infrastructure?” In 2016, there will likely no longer be an infrastructure debate about use of cloud, but there will be an important emerging discussion around managing hybrid IT.
6. Collaboration will drive “silo” to the realm of four-letter words
Anywhere, anytime also means any type of collaboration. SMB & midmarket businesses will look for unified shared workspaces that allow employees to enter into the workspace from any entry point to work together, collaborate and interact. Collaboration solutions cannot be deployed on stand-alone platforms – they need to be viewed as a framework for integrating multiple capabilities, native to multiple applications.
