Big Data In 2014: Top Technologies, Trends

Big data joined the business lexicon in a big way in 2013. Some days it seemed like every press release and technology news item crossing our desk included the phrase. In fact, the wild popularity of the term might have masked important developments -- technical, operational, and other -- involving big data and its associated technologies.

As we look ahead to 2014, we put out a call on social media asking for 2014 big data predictions. Here are some of the responses we received:

"The hot new data of 2013 was 'exhaust data' powered by the Internet of Things. This will take further hold during 2014, but the hot data of next year will be human data. With knowledge that employee data has been shown to do everything from help manage organizational health to be a leading indicator of quarterly consumer demand, this area will be a hot area for startups. Expect another round of TOS updates from LinkedIn." --Dan Malligner, data science practice lead, Think Big Analytics

"The data-information-insight-decision lifecycle will get shortened due to machine learning-based automated decision systems; increased adoption of Cloud ETL to analyze on-premise and off-premise open data; open-source solutions such as R will replace legacy solutions like SAS; the number of offerings of reporting solutions embedded in cloud with 90-day deployment will increase." --Milind Kelkar, leader, Smart Decisions Lab, Genpact

[Who are next year's rising stars in business intelligence? Read 2014 BI Outlook: Who's Hot, Who's Not.]

"The future of big data in 2014 will be 'where.' Location intelligence is of paramount importance to companies as their customers are increasingly handling the majority of their daily activity on mobile, from online banking to restaurant check-ins and social sharing in real time. Having precise location data helps organizations understand relationships between specific locations so that they can identify growth opportunities, improve information sharing internally and to their customers, and make better strategic business decisions." --James Buckley, SVP, customer data and location intelligence, Pitney Bowes Software

"It's a major problem for businesses that their online and offline data management systems don't talk to one another. For example, when prospective customers start their buying process online but choose to make a phone call for assistance, the online analytics vanish. Businesses will be seeking means of appending specified data points to those interactions so they have the appropriate IDs and device information to retarget that customer on any given channel. The focus will increasingly be on automating how that data is reported, packaged, and sent to other systems." --Eric Holmen, CMO, Invoca

"While Hadoop is still immature, technology advances like YARN are contributing to an enterprise-friendly big data future. Because of YARN, we'll increase opportunities to use new and more optimally efficient engines and expand Hadoop possibilities." --Mike Hoskins, CTO, Actian

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