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Thought Leadership

Big Data: Where Do We Stand and What’s Next?

2012 was undoubtedly the year of Big Data. It dominated headlines, and enterprises all over the globe started implementing, or at least drafting, a Big Data strategy within their organization. And Big Data’s exponential growth makes sense, as nearly 90 percent of all the data in the world has been created in the past two years and approximately 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created each day. Additionally, IDC Financial Insights found that spending on Big Data and analytic solutions has reached $6 billion worldwide. And as soon as next year, Gartner projects that Big Data will help drive IT spending to $3.8 trillion. But as data continues to propagate at an exponential pace and 2012 already reigning as the year of Big Data, what should we expect in 2013? How will companies be using Big Data in 2013 and beyond?

Big Data in Mobile

It seems that anything mobile-related has made its way into every prediction piece over the past few years. However, the extent to which mobile will influence Big Data in 2013 is new, and will continue to evolve for years to come. With the rise of the mobile wallet, organizations will use mobile as a key vehicle to deliver personalized coupons, product offers and rewards based on consumers’ location and other behavioral preferences. Underscoring this trend, a recent survey from Aite Group found that the number of U.S. consumers using a mobile device to access their bank account will increase from 33 million to 96 million by 2016. As consumers increasingly turn to mobile to do just about everything, mobile will continuously be a huge driver of data creation in 2013 and beyond, and present a significant opportunity to organizations that have the resources to take advantage of all this data.

Despite critics deeming that 2013 is not the year for mobile wallets because “smartphone users aren’t that tech savvy,” I disagree and believe smartphone users are more tech-savvy than the pundits give them credit for. The mobile wallet will soon become one of the most important ways for banks and retailers to interface with customers, as consumers are increasingly conducting their banking and purchases from mobile devices and now expect the convenience for this access. But in order for banks and retailers to effectively compete with online players like PayPal and Google, they need to develop and execute a mobile wallet strategy now – or risk losing business.

Big Data Technology

Technology-wise, we see the transitioning of Big Data applications from the pure infrastructure-level into the enterprise. We move from geek-level petabyte management and number crunching into challenges such as customer relationship improvement, behavioral targeting, churn prevention and improved operational efficiency.

This puts a whole new series of requirements on the shoulders of Big Data technology suppliers: easy to install, enterprise architecture fit, manageability, audit-ability, hands-off operations. As few enterprises have an interest in hiring full-time Hadoop hackers, they expect Big Data solutions to behave as any other enterprise solution. As such, 2013 will be a defining year for the success of the various Hadoop distributions.

Big Data has been all about analysis and ad-hoc analysis, but the holy grail of 2013 and beyond will be about real-time Big Data. Tools such as Cloudera Impala allow organizations to explore Big Data sets as if they are stored in relational databases without the need for specific indexes. Big Data doesn’t need to be big, slow and batch anymore, and as technical capabilities evolve to a general-purpose real-time data infrastructure, business requirements will see that opportunity and make use of it.

More to come on where Big Data is headed, but for now, where do you see Big Data going in 2013?