This year, "Leading adopters in the mainstream IT world will move from 'proof of concept' to real value," the report states.

However, lack of qualified talent will limit the technology's rise during the next two to three years, it adds.

The coming years will also see a "battle between open source purists, who believe that the core of Hadoop deployment must be based purely on the Apache project code," according to IDC. However, most IT organizations will use a mix of commercial and open-source components in their Hadoop environments, the report adds.

Still, "competition between open source vendors and their closed source counterparts may force lower license fees from the latter group, resulting in somewhat slower

software revenue growth than would be the case if open source projects did not represent so large a component of this market space."