The New Year will mark a transition for Big Data from theory to practice, experts say.

“The past years we saw a lot of talk around Big Data. More conferences, new books, more Big Data startups and more interesting best practices are being shared and distributed online and offline,” said Mark van Rijmenam, founder of big data knowledge platform BigData-Startups.com.

“In 2014 many more organizations will start working towards a Big Data strategy and start developing a Proof of Concept (PoC) to investigate what Big Data can mean for them. The PoC will help organizations gain a better understanding of Big Data, will help them get educated and will help them to be better able to predict the ROI of future Big Data projects,” van Rijmenam said in a blog. “A Proof of Concept is a vital part of a Big Data strategy when you start with Big Data.”

Organizations will have to ensure that the Big Data strategy that they develop is geared towards the exponential growth of data that can be expected in the coming years. “2013 was already exciting as we saw many things happening, but 2014 will be truly interesting as Big Data will become common language in boardrooms and organizations start to experiment with it,” van Rijmenam said.

IDC projects the Big Data market will grow to $ 16.1 billion in 2014 and they also forecast that the Big Data technology and services market will continue to grow at a 27% CAGR to $ 32.4 billion through 2017.

“We already see more and more Big Data startups that are creating a Big-Data-as-a-Service solution to help organizations apply Big Data without the heavy costs involved,” said van Rijmenam.

This is especially useful for small or medium sized enterprises that want to develop a data-driven information-centric organization, but do not have the capacity to develop and maintain a full-fledge Big Data solution on premises.

“Big-data-as-a-Service is a combination of Analytics-as-a-service, Infrastructure-as-a-Service and Data-as-a-Service and it will spur the adoption of Big Data also by smaller and medium sized organizations,” van Rijmenam said.

Gartner predicts that cloud computing will become the bulk in IT spending by 2016 and 2014 will be a turning point in the acceptance of the cloud as part of a Big Data strategy.

“It is extremely important to understand not only the stages but how to move from one stage to the next,” said Svetlana Sicular, research director at Gartner, in a presentation. “Develop or adjust your big data strategy by using the big data adoption roadmap.”

Big Data is also Fast Data.
“Big data is high-volume, high-velocity and high variety information assets that demand cost-effective, innovative forms of information processing for enhanced insight and decision making,” said Sicular.

“An initial goal of big data adoption must be learning and growing big data expertise,” she said. “Build your big data strategy by planning improvement
targets for four dimensions at each stage: business, people,
process and technology.”