Hadoop is an open-source implementation of the MapReduce framework. It is hosted at the Apache Software Foundation along with a number of supporting software projects, including the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) and Pig programming language.

MapReduce and Hadoop are based on the principle of splitting up large amounts of data and then processing the chunks in parallel across large numbers of nodes. It's closely associated with the industry buzzword "big data," which refers to the ever-larger volumes of information, particularly of unstructured form, being generated by websites, social media, sensors and other sources.

Overall, Hadoop has enjoyed a steady stream of interest from commercial analytics and database vendors in recent years, who have begun offering commercial products and services for it.

While "fantastic and largely unsupportable claims have been made" regarding Hadoop and MapReduce's use cases and benefits, "there can be no doubt that it does provide a relatively low-cost means of deriving considerable value from very large collections of unorganized data," IDC analysts Carl Olofson and Dan Vesset wrote in the report.

Therefore, the conditions are right for significant growth in the Hadoop-MapReduce "ecosystem," according to IDC.