Slice and Dice

After a long car ride, and studying 65 BI/analytics vendors, here are 5 bigger truths about big data.

Do Teradata's tepid Q1-FY13 results suggest weaker demand in general for big data, or a changing of the guard?

Actian's buying blitz puts it in the middle of the big data mix, now Actian just needs to execute excellently.

IBM DB2 steps up to the columnar and performance plate to help IBM continue its considerable momentum in big data.

You thought big data was big? Try the Data Economy on for size.

Oracle Database Appliance blossoms into more than just a database appliance with ODA X3-2

Sorting through all the activity around the Strata Santa Clara conference, my eyebrows were raised by four offerings, two dealing with sorting/indexing, two dealing with the R statistical development language.

The data economy will continue to create demand for the "dark matter" of data integration.

Are the Hadoop distributions from major vendors EMC-Greenplum and Intel the new black of big data?

Adding security through data masking to the Informatica Cloud to better enable and protect development and testing is a long step in the right direction.

Big data certainly counts as one of the key trends in business and IT for 2013, but let's not get too carried away.

Privatization will afford Dell the opportunity to try different avenues. The question remains will they break new trail, or continue driving down the same old roads?

While Informatica beat street estimates for revenue and profit in Q4, reversing the momentum from two previously disppointing quarters, ESG sees Informatica's ability to meet healthy demand for cloud integration helping to maintain the positive momentum going forward.

Though services-oriented big data vendors held sway during 2012, a palpable shift will begin in 2013 towards big data applications, platforms, and productivity.

In the first half of 2012, "cloud" and "big data" were nearly oxymorons.  Driven, however, by innovations from providers like Amazon Web Services, Joyent, and Microsoft Azure in the latter half of the year, big data in the cloud will threaten on-premises and appliance big data implmenetations during 2013.

If 2012 was the year where VCs went a little wild with early stage big data solution suppliers, 2013 will be a year of reconciliation.

Though 10gen, DataStax, and SAP HANA set the pace in 2012, the advantages of MPP/analytics and graph databases will enlarge the value gap in 2013 between pure analytics databases and more general purpose databases.

Cisco, EMC, and Oracle blazed hardware/infrastructure paths during 2012, and 2013 will continue to the move towards appliances—with cloud looming as a threat.