Friday, December 30, 2011

Big Data Predictions for 2012

Well 2011 has been a great year for Hadoop and its supporting ecosystem. There is a growing base of sub projects evolving to fill the many niches in and around Hadoop and there are companies coming out of the wood work to claim their piece of the pie. Not to mention the VC money pouring into Big Data related startups and many established tech players changing their business plans to account for Hadoop. So what can we expect in 2012?

Here are seven predictions for what might be in store for Big Data in 2012:

1) Going Mainstream
Discovering all of what you can do with Big Data analytics in the enterprise is only in its infancy. Right now solutions like Hadoop are the secret weapon of the rich and social who can afford the investment in time, resources and infrastructure. Companies like Facebook and Twitter are using solutions like Hadoop to do things not possible before with traditional relational BI and analytics solutions. We will see in 2012 the window widening with more traditional enterprises seeing the potential benefits that Hadoop analytics can offer. We will see more companies in various industries look to leverage Hadoop to ask questions about their operations and customers not possible before. Look for Hadoop to go more mainstream and loose some of that exoticness that currently relegates it only to the big boys.

2) Put it in the Cloud
The barrier of entry is lowering for Hadoop with players like Amazon offering low cost of entry platforms for initial Hadoop deployments. In 2012 we will see continued acceptance of using the Cloud as the infrastructure of choice for deploying your Hadoop. With Amazon and others improving virtual private network services it will make integrating private Cloud solutions for Hadoop more palatable for security conscious enterprises. Cloud will be the target platform of choice for Hadoop in 2012. This will also open the door for smaller enterprises to dip their toe into Hadoop to discover what they have been missing in their volumes of consumer and operational data warehouses.

3) Automation and Integration
Right now most Hadoop deployments are islands of data and processing infrastructure. In the coming year we will see more tech companies begin to offer better tools to enable businesses to tie their back office data stores and data warehouses with their Hadoop environments in a more seamless fashion. Efficiently moving customer and business data out of traditional data stores such as relational databases, and processed and prepared for Hadoop consumption will be critical for successful Hadoop deployments. We anticipate a new category of ETL that will be focused on the management of data movement in and out of Hadoop and HDFS. This will gain more traction in 2012. There are already Hadoop projects focusing on related areas and we will see more Hadoop type connectors popping up from traditional software vendors eager to get their products integrated with Hadoop.

4) Analytics and Visualization
Traditional BI reporting tools are not geared well toward the type of output generated from Big Data type environments. A new breed of reporting tools and analytics solutions will emerge to better consume the output coming out of Big Data systems. Look for many traditional BI vendors to begin to tailor their front-end reporting solutions to fit with Hadoop and distributed data stores including NoSQL type of data stores. But much of what traditional BI vendors will offer will not be a natural fit since most of the BI vendors and their tools are more comfortable dealing with highly structured data. Also as business analytics in companies start to get a taste of the kind of problems that can now be solved with Big Data, that were not possible before, they will begin to think of new problems to ask that will drive the need for more visualization and reporting of the data coming out of Big Data. So keep an eye out for startups and tech companies offering Big Data native analytics solutions tailored from the ground up for visualizing the statistical kinds of data coming out of Hadoop. Turning statistical questions, common when dealing with Big Data, into visual reports that can be understood by business users will be a big leap forward to turning the raw data in many enterprises into meaningful value and actionable results.

5) Going Mobile
We will see in 2012 apps and solutions that allow business users to get a glimpse of their Hadoop operations and resulting output presented on mobile and tablet devices. This one is not a big stretch considering the growing proliferation of mobile computing. But look for Hadoop to get a bit more mobile in 2012. Visualization of BI on mobile is natural trend and Big Data is no exception.

6) Going Vertical and Healthcare
Healthcare is the perennial elephant in the room when it comes to needing operational efficiency improvements and managing exploding volume of patient data (not to mention making sense of patient data). From both the billing dimension and the diagnostic patient data aspect, healthcare will benefit greatly from the type of problems that Big Data can solve. In 2012 we will see healthcare providers and healthcare IT companies begin to seriously invest in Big Data to help them solve problems not possible before with traditional healthcare IT. Look for healthcare providers to tap Hadoop to better understand their patients inorder to deal with the volumes of digital patient data and to help them deal with government regulations and compliance.

7) Real-Time Big Data?
This might be a stretch, but look for some early signs of various tech player looking to deliver more real-time business solutions around Big Data. Hadoop brings tremendous processing power to bear to solve problems that were not practical before. With computing power growing and virtualization easer to manage and deploy, look for business users to demand Big Data type problems to be solved in more near real-time situations. This will open the door for even more interesting applications of Big Data for business and even end consumers.

Let's regroup in twelve months and see how well these predictions panned out :)

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