Those rare companies that decide to engage in hand-coding do it either because they lack the required information (they simply don't know there are packaged solutions out there) or, frankly, in my opinion, they are chasing a pipe dream. They often mistakenly believe that all a big data project takes is to feed data into a Hadoop cluster. They figure developing a dedicated on-premises infrastructure to feed and analyze big data will mean a 20 percent savings over a packaged solution. However, according to Gartner, this approach results in a 200 percent increase in maintenance costs. And that's not all.… [Continue Reading]