There is little doubt that Hadoop adoption is growing, and not just among enterprise-sized organizations, but by small- and medium-sized businesses as well. In an effort to understand this maturing market more deeply, Pepperdata conducted a survey about how and why Hadoop is used for business operations.

The 134 survey respondents came from a range of experience, but all work at companies currently running Hadoop in production. The majority of respondents were from software engineering/development, data scientist, or data architect job titles (25 percent, 17 percent, and 12 percent, respectively). Almost half (40 percent) were from the information technology industry, with education and financial services (11 percent and 10 percent) coming in second and third. Over 45 percent have been in production for two years or more, with 15 percent of those being "advanced users" (four years or more in production).

In this slideshow, Pepperdata shares findings from the survey, such as key use cases, the size of Hadoop environments, and biggest challenges to production deployment.