Big Data in Context Big Data is an ‘umbrella’ term that is commonly used to refer to a number of advanced data storage, access and analytics technologies aimed at handling high volume and/or fast moving data in a variety of scenarios. These typically involve low signal-to-noise ratios, such as social media sentiment monitoring, or log file analysis …
A new term for the marketing boys to get stuck into now that everyone is sick to the teeth with "Cloud".
Like Cloud, Big Data could be so many different things its tantamount to useless as term.
Still , it’s an easy way to immediately work out that someone is going to be spewing bullshit as soon as they declare “We provide Big Data solutions”
I agree that this big data is likely overhyped - I once wrote that the reason that we have big data is the number of tweets that are related to big data! I do think though that since this survey was focused primarily on the awareness of technologies that are commonly associated with large data volumes that it might under-represent what people are doing with big data. To me, big data is relative and any organization can have a tipping point when volume or complexity of data makes it difficult to make accurate decisions in a timely fashion. And, I also think it's important to look at the business use cases, this is where we are seeing activity around big data, regardless of the size and the technologies that are being used. Organizations are expanding their ability to leverage data, data that was discarded or not fully leveraged in the past - whether it be social data, sensor data, etc., whether you call it big data or not, these forms of data represent business opportunity.
Mark Troester
SAS
twitter @mtroester
http://blogs.sas.com/content/datamanagement/
The Register 
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