Many IT and business leaders are not planning to invest in the big data technology and even those that have been early adopters, are not calling for further adoption over the next two years.

The Hadoop framework which allows for the distributed processing of large data sets across clusters of computers is seen by many as overkill for the problems that the business faced, implying that the costs of implementing the technology were too high relative to the expected benefit.

Gartner found that only 26% of respondents were either deploying, piloting or experimenting with the technology and just 11% planned to invest within the next year.

Nick Heudecker, research director at Gartner, said: "Despite considerable hype and reported successes for early adopters, 54 percent of survey respondents report no plans to invest at this time, while only 18 percent have plans to invest in Hadoop over the next two years."

"Furthermore, the early adopters don’t appear to be championing for substantial Hadoop adoption over the next 24 months; in fact, there are fewer who plan to begin in the next two years than already have."

Adoption is being significantly hurt by the skills gap which 57% highlighted as a major inhibitor and while tooling vendors have claimed that their products address the skills gap, this is clearly not being felt in the market.

It is predicted that it will take two to three years to address the skills gap and for the Hadoop vendors training programs to make an impact.

Merv Adrian, research VP, Gartner, said: "With such large incidence of organizations with no plans or already on their Hadoop journey, future demand for Hadoop looks fairly anemic over at least the next 24 months."

"Moreover, the lack of near-term plans for Hadoop adoption suggest that, despite continuing enthusiasm for the big data phenomenon, demand for Hadoop specifically is not accelerating."

"The best hope for revenue growth for providers would appear to be in moving to larger deployments within their existing customer base."

Gartner questioned 284 research circle members between February and March this year.