As businesses runs on the wheel of this high-value data, IDC expects to see offerings that more closely integrate data and analytics technologies, such as in-memory databases and BI tools, move into the mainstream. Big Data will earn its place as the next “must have” competency in 2012 as the volume of digital content grows to 2.7 zettabytes (ZB), up 48% from 2011. Over 90% of this information will be unstructured, that is in the form of multimedia files. Social media growth and data-driven analytics has given the old-data a new breathe.

In 2012, Big Data backed by, social media rise and highier demand for data-analytics, will gain a place as the next "must have" lead for the IT world. Cisco reports, as the volume of digital content grows to 2.7 zettabytes (ZB), up 48% from 2011. Chris Kanaracus, IDG News Service, predicts Big Data together with analytics get even bigger, hotter in 2012 and will be the foremost tech-trend that wil rule the IT-world irrespective of the platform or service. He adds, Big Data seems to be the new SOA (service oriented architecture) as industry terms go, with seemingly every other vendor product pitch attempting to hitch a ride. All are professing to help with the same problem: getting something useful out of ever-larger mountains of information, not only from transactional business applications but unstructured data from social networking sites, sensors and other sources. 2012 is likely to be a busy year for Big Data activities.

Research firm IDC predicts the size of data – what it calls the “digital universe” – will grow to 2.7 zetabytes in 2012, up 48 percent from 2011’s record year. That will lead to more data and analytics, in turn accelerating the innovation and adoption of in-memory databases and BI tools and overall analytic functionality in the database. The amount of information created and processed has grown by a factor of nine over the last five years and will surpass 1.8 zettabytes this year.

Forrester’s Boris Evelson stated in his blog, “Big data will start to move out of silos and into enterprise IT. IT will start to learn how to live with it.”  Shawn Rogers, Enterprise Management Associates research VP, wrote- “Through inventive technologies and design approaches, computing workloads within the enterprise are finding better and even the best platforms for executing their mission. We can be sure that big data technology will be part of the data ecosystem that supports analytics and BI moving forward.”

In addition to increases in cloud computing and consumerization of IT, analysts predict that in 2012, we’ll see noticeable increases in big data.

Dave Kellogg, Senior Vice President (Cloud Services)-Salesforce.com estimates three reasons for such underlining evolution of Big-Data trend. He says, "I think Big Data is hot for three reasons:"

• Major new innovation is finally happening with databases for the first time in three decades.
• Hardware architectures have changed — people want to scale horizontally like Google.
• We are experiencing a serious explosion in the amount of data people are analyzing and managing. Machine-generated data, the exhaust of the Web, is driving a lot of it.

Cloud will see convergence with Big-Data in the year 2012. Big Data intersects with cloud in several ways. First, the concept of whole cloud services revolves around the data-driven engagements. Second, data is the most crucial as IP-drives the marketplace on security fronts and vendors together with service users are cautious and hence have replicated several innovative ways and models for data-usage on cloud. Cloud holds data and the cloud-based services processes data from peer to peer. Be it private or public, data is the cellular structure of cloud services, all efforts are being directed towards highly secured data and analytics management. Hence we see a clear convergence of cloud-based services and data-driven analytics and processes.

According to the research firm Gartner, at year-end 2016, more than 50 percent of Global 1000 companies will have stored customer-sensitive data in the public cloud”. Gratner states, for 2012, the size, complexity of formats and speed of delivery of these massive data sets will require new or unique tools for management.  

IT is constantly evolving, they will focus on tightly integrating cloud-based services. They will also continue to focus on company-proprietary analytics used to gain competitive advantage.

Big Data will join mobile and cloud as the next "Hot-Trend" as enterprise mobility is expected to grow phenomenally and impact every platforms or process-verticals in coming 3 years.