What's the Big Deal About Hadoop?

Hadoop is all the rage, it seems. With more than 150 enterprises of various sizes using it -- including major companies such as JP Morgan Chase, Google and Yahoo -- it may seem inevitable that the open-source Big Data management system will land in your shop, too.

But before rushing in, make sure you know what you're signing up for. Using Hadoop requires training and a level of analytics expertise that not all companies have quite yet, customers and industry analysts say. And it's still a very young market; a number of Hadoop vendors are duking it out with various implementations, including cloud-based.