It is a fun environment and the community is very friendly and smart too. Its widespread adoption in finance is because it is a proven tool for processing the huge datasets that other systems cannot. If you have a business case for that, clearly it can be a worthwhile investment. Other industries are beginning to see value in leveraging their data sets and that's probably why after being in the business for 20+ years kx continues to expand their customer base; note they now have pharma and energy customers. Yes, there are difficulties involved in managing huge data sets, but IMO no other tools does it better than kdb+.