As 2013 draws to a close, it is time for big data industry players to reflect on what progress was made in 2013 and what we might expect in 2014. We’ve heard from many of our friends in the big data ecosystem with their views for the next year. Here’s an example of some observations from Pentaho’s CEO Quentin Gallivan. He predicts that 2014 will be the year that business executives – whether they be data analysts, line of business managers or CEOs – are really going to start driving the big data agenda. Specifically, he believes it will be the growing demand for insights derived from “blended” data that will really start to propel big data up the “power curve.”
Pentaho offers a suite of open source Business Intelligence (BI) products called Pentaho Business Analytics. You can read Quentin’s full analysis and predictions for 2014 HERE.
Another prediction for 2014 comes from Michele Chambers, CSO and vice president of product management & marketing at Revolution Analytics:
The dam will break for the data scientist supply and demand issue of 2013 for two reasons. First – higher education institutions have quickly adapted to this market need with custom programs to train the next generation of data scientists. In 2014, those grads will be entering the workforce. Second, companies are getting better at carving out focused, big picture projects for data scientists and pushing smaller and line of business projects to business users and data analyst.”
MapR’s CEO and Cofounder, John Schroeder, has some thoughts regarding major developments he believes will drive Big Data to become a must-have infrastructure for larger enterprises:
Every industry leader will deploy a new data centric application or they won’t be leading for long. The ability to leverage Big Data will emerge as the competitive weapon in 2014 as more companies will use Big Data and Hadoop to pinpoint individual consumers’ preferences for profitable upsell and cross-sell opportunities, better mitigate risk, and reduce production and overhead costs.
ZDNet also weighs in on 2014 insights with a great article containing a summary of big data new year predictions from Tableau, Tibco, Alteryx, Basho and Gainsight – Predicting Big Data’s 2014.
Actian acquired both Pervasive Software and then ParAccel in April, to complete the data management stack from enabling data collection to analytics to action. With the acquisitions, Actian is second to Splunk as one of the biggest software company in big data. Actian CTO Mike Hoskins makes the following predictions for 2014:
We’ll see an important evolution in analytics in 2014, as operational analytics become universal and business processes are optimized through analytics. Dataflow architectures will emerge as the natural paradigm for building highly parallelized analytic pipelines. This technology can scrutinize massive, diverse datasets to provide insights to users within their day-to-day operational frameworks. As a result, lines of businesses will be able to take advantage of small windows of market opportunity, avoid risks ahead that might have not been anticipated, and deliver valuable, personalized information to their customers.
Also weighing in is Brett Sheppard, big data director of Splunk:
2014 will be the year of the big data non-specialist. Until recently, many big data projects—including those built with Hadoop—have required the skills of highly trained data scientists. They’ve also tended to rely on fixed schemas and scheduled reporting that limit the kinds of questions the system can answer. Starting in 2014, line-of-business employees will be able to ask and answer their own questions using raw, unstructured big data from disparate sources. They won’t need to rely on specialists to unlock the value of big data. Inevitably, they’ll start using data to help make decisions they previously might have made on gut-feel alone. Decision-making will also become a more creative process, as employees of all kinds start asking questions of their data to test hypotheses and explore new approaches to old problems.”
And from Emcien we have a thought providing 2014 article, “What Changes Will Big Data Analytics Bring,” including a refreshing observation:
One of the most exciting prospects the data economy brings for the working world is the opportunity to spend less time collecting and analyzing the information needed to act and more time acting on it and understanding it.”
CEO of Paxata, Prakash Nanduri, has a different take on big data in 2014 – this is the year big data needs to start showing its business value. People who have made huge investments it are starting to realize they’ve put the tech before the business case. He believes we have to admit that big data has been used up to this point for needle-in-the-haystack analytics- 2014 will see the end of that, as data preparation techniques become more advanced.
On the Hortonworks side of the Hadoop universe, the company plans an important strategic webinar on January 21, 2014. Shaun Connolly, VP of Strategy, Hortonworks where he’ll be covering the Enterprise Hadoop State of the Union. During this webinar, Shaun will touch on 2013’s key innovations like YARN, Tez, and Stinger. Also, Shaun will go through some of the current and future initiatives like security, data set management and Hadoop’s evolving ecosystem.
We here at insideBIGDATA believe that 2014 holds much promise for the big data industry as it is the year when companies have had some time to plan out new initiatives and work out budgets to embrace the new technologies. 2014 will be the year for across the board adoption of all that big data can bring.
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