How Tax Figures into Hadoop’s Rapidly Expanding Ecosystem

Hadoop is the “most-deployed and most-discussed big data technology,” according to enterprise software expert and Demandbase SVP technology Aman Naimat. The open-source software platform is commonly described as an “ecosystem” that stores and processes vast amounts of data via many different components.

This ecosystem is of growing interest to the tax realm, based on what I heard at the recent Hadoop Summit organized by Hortonworks, a company whose stated mission is to “manage the world’s data.”

Hadoop’s value resides in its abilities to transcend traditional database management systems and to process non-structured types of data, such as digital photos. The platform’s open-sourced nature has helped it grow dramatically – in terms of what it can do – during the past five years. These growing capabilities, including those related to securing massive amounts of data, figured as key topics at the conference.

Any technology related to storing, securing and processing large amounts of data is worth a closer look from a tax management perspective. In the increasingly complex realm of corporate tax, more data always must be captured. Data management routinely figures as the area that consumes the most time and attention within tax departments.

Additionally, thanks to the ongoing wave of digital transformation, more and more business models are data-based, which means that tax functions will need to become even more adept at managing (even more) data in the future. The Hadoop ecosystems could very well offer valuable tools to help tax functions in their tax planning, tax provisioning and tax compliance activities.

As Hadoop’s impressive growth continues, we’ll keep you posted on how it can benefit tax.