If you just invested a lot of money in a Big Data solution from any of the traditional BI vendors (Teradata, IBM, Oracle, SAS, EMC, HP, etc.) then you are likely to see a sub-optimal ROI in 2013.
Several innovations will come in 2013 that will change the value of Big Data exponentially. Other technology innovations are just waiting for smart start-ups to put them into good use.
Real-Time Hadoop
The first major innovation will be Google’s Dremel-like solutions coming of age like Impala, Drill, etc. They will allow real-time queries on Big Data and be open source. So you will get a superior offering compared to what is currently available for free.
Cloud-Based Big Data Solutions
The absolute market leader is Amazon with EMR. Elastic Map Reduce is not so much about being able to run a Map Reduce operation in the Cloud but about paying for what you use and not more. The traditional BI vendors are still getting their head around a usage-based licensing for the Cloud. Except a lot of smart startups to come up with really innovative Big Data and Cloud solutions.
Big Data Appliances
You can buy some really expensive Big Data Appliances but also here disruptive players are likely to change the market. GPUs are relatively cheap. Stack them into servers and use something like Virtual OpenCL to make your own GPU virtualization cluster solution. These type of home-made GPU clusters are already being used for security Big Data related work.
Also expect more hardware vendors to pack mobile ARM processors into server boxes. Dell, HP, etc. are already doing it. Imagine the potential for Distributed Map Reduce.
Finally Parallella will put a 16-core supercomputer into everybody’s hands for $99. Their 2013 supercomputer challenge is definitely something to keep your eyes on. Their roadmap talks about 64 and 1000 core versions. If Adapteva can keep their promises and flood the market with Parallella’s then expect Parallella Clusters to be 2013 Big Data Appliance.
Distributed Machine Learning
Mahout is a cool project but Map Reduce might not be the best possible architecture to run iterative distributed backpropagation or any other machine learning algorithms. Jubatus looks promising. Also algorithm innovations like HogWild could really change the dynamics for efficient distributed machine learning. This space is definitely ready for more ground-breaking innovations in 2013.
Easier Big Data Tools
This is still a big white spot in the Open Source field. Having Open Source and easy to use drag-and-drop tools for Big Data Analytics would really excel the adoption. We already have some good commercial examples (Radoop = RapidMiner + Mahout, Tableau, Datameer, etc.) but we are missing good Open Source tools.
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[This post originally appeared on Maarten Ectors’ Telruptive blog and is republished with permission]