"There is slow, steady adoption," Merv Adrian, a research vice president and analyst at Gartner, told InformationWeek.

Hadoop is transitioning from its early adopter stage to the threshold of mainstream use. But Hadoop's place on the "hype cycle" is pretty much normal. Hadoop is in the "trough of disillusionment," prior to reaching its "plateau of productivity,"Basically, early adoption is giving way to "early mainstream," he said.

Just don't expect the market for Hadoop to skyrocket. With over half of respondents saying they will make no investment in Hadoop for the next two years, demand will be flat and muted.

Right now, not many are connected to Hadoop. According to replies in the Gartner survey, about 20% with investments in Hadoop have six to ten users using it, while another 28% of respondents have single-user systems.

Hadoop allows for distributed processing of large data sets across many computers through the use of a simple programming model. That makes Hadoop ideal for analyzing big data. But the downside is that many of the tools needed to manage and backup such a system are in their infancy, and the simple front-end to permit use by non-experts is not there yet.