The guidance is based on the experiences of some early adopters of Hadoop, including Yahoo, AOL, Mozilla and Klout. It cautions companies against getting carried away by the hype surrounding the technology and advocates a staged Hadoop deployment driven purely by business goals.

Avoid Hadoop "science projects" that lack business value, the report noted. "Be careful not to mistake Hadoop's technological gee whiz factor with a genuine business case that delivers real business value."

Hadoop is an open source technology designed to help companies manage and process extremely large volumes of data. Much of Hadoop's lies in its ability to break up large data sets into smaller data blocks that are then distributed across a cluster of commodity hardware for faster processing.

Early adopters have been using Hadoop to store and analyze petabytes of unstructured data that other enterprise data warehouse technologies have not been able to handle as easily. The fact that it is an open source technology with growing vendor support has greatly contributed to its growing allure within enterprises.

"Hadoop is the of enterprise data warehouses," said James Kobielus, a Forrester analyst and one of the co-authors of the report. "It is being adopted and forked and tweaked and optimized," in much the same way that Linux was in the early days, he said.