The hype around Hadoop has pushed many BI vendors to proclaim their support for big data technology without explaining what exactly that means, Forrester analyst Boris Evelson warned in a today. As a result, IT managers should push their BI vendors for clarification before buying claims about Hadoop integration, Evelson said today.

"Hadoop is not a single entity, it's a conglomeration of multiple projects, each addressing a certain niche within the Hadoop ecosystem such as data access, data integration, DBMS, system management, reporting, analytics, data exploration and much, much more," he wrote.

Companies need to be aware of such distinctions and know what questions to ask when evaluating Hadoop/BI integration claims, Evelson said.

"If a company is using Hadoop and Big Data for the right reasons and they want to use a BI tool to do the analysis, the level of integration is important," Evelson added in comments to Computerworld via email.

Over the past two years, a have begun using open source and commercial versions of the Hadoop Distributed File System to store and organize huge amounts of unstructured data from the web. In addition to transactional data from CRM, ERP and general ledger systems, companies have also begun gathering a lot of new data from the web, from social media, micro-blogging sites such as Twitter and from machine sensors.