The Big Data analytics marketplace is truly heating up in terms of interest, activity, technology and competition. According to a Wikibon report published recently, the total Big Data market reached $11.4 billion in 2012. But  2013 is the year that big data is going big time, so here we bring a round-up of what various IT industry executive have been saying about the fast-growing sector reckoned to be headed toward $53 billion by 2017, culled from Cloud Computing Journal and Big Data Journal.

The Opportunity for Solving Big Data Analytics Is "Tantalizingly Within Reach"

"With compute power and storage now an affordable commodity and with the evolution of technologies that can efficiently process massive amounts and types of data in a non-transactional system - the opportunity for solving Big Data analytics is tantalizingly within reach, and that's attractive for any business."

Victoria Kouyoumjian, Sr. Business and Technologies Strategist at Esri

[Read the full Q&A session from Cloud Computing Journal here.]


Cloud Made Big Data What It Is Today

"Cloud made Big Data what it is today. Cloud gave us the massively scalable infrastructure necessary to practically do Big Data, as well as the engineering mindset that made it a front-of-mind solution for organizations that may not have considered it before."

Scott Morrison, CTO & Chief Architect at Layer 7 Technologies

[Read the full Q&A session from Cloud Computing Journal here.]

Big Data [is] the Foundation of Intelligence

"Exponentially increasing data volume, Internet access points and speed have made Big Data more accessible and therefore more practical. Add social media, mobile proliferation, cloud computing, and CDNs to the mix and now it becomes the foundation of intelligence. Of course Big Data is useless hype unless you know how to extract, analyze and act on it."

Mike Carpenter, VP of Business Development at CARI.net

[Read the full Q&A session from Cloud Computing Journal here.]


On-Demand Big Data Infrastructure and Analysis is a Game Changer

"With true cloud computing available from a variety of sources, and more spawning daily, you can crunch Oracle, SQL and Hadoop to your heart's content without standing up big iron. You can fire up a Big Data project in the cloud, do the work and turn it off when finished. On-demand Big Data infrastructure and analysis is a game changer for large enterprises and is trickling down into the small and medium enterprise. Everyone needs better BI to compete globally."

Rob LaMear IV, CEO and Founder of Fpweb.net

[Read the full Q&A session from Cloud Computing Journal here.]


You Need a Business Model

"Making money from Big Data starts with data, but you need a business model, developers who get devops, and a cloud infrastructure built for agility and economy."

Troy Angrignon, formerly VP of Sales & Partnering at Cloudscaling

[Read the full Q&A session from Cloud Computing Journal here.]


Use Big Data to Make Decisions

"What good is data without putting it to use to make good decisions?"

Robert Miggins, Sr. VP of business development for PEER 1 Hosting

[Read the full Q&A session from Cloud Computing Journal here.]



Commodity Hardware + Software-Based Intelligence Powers Big Data Analytics

"Modern enterprise architectures built on commodity hardware with software-based intelligence and automation are powering workflows and data sets that would have required dedicated special-purpose hardware in the past. Big Data analytics platforms and high-performance cluster file systems such as GPFS are great examples of this."

John Gilmartin, VP of Product Marketing at Coraid

[Read the full Q&A session from Cloud Computing Journal here.]

Data By Itself Gives No Competitive Advantage

"Far too many companies pat themselves on the back for having terabytes or petabytes of data. But data has no intrinsic value, and maintaining the infrastructure necessary to capture and warehouse data has very real costs. Data by itself doesn't give you any competitive advantage. It's only if you act on that data that you can drive more revenue and secure competitive advantages."

John A. De Goes, CEO & Founder of Precog

[Read the full Q&A session from Cloud Computing Journal here.]


Data Needs to be Related to Other Data

"Data is meaningless without turning it into useful information. Almost always this involves relating the data to other data (e.g., "How many people purchased Product X last month?" involves relating a customer to a product and a time period)."

Cory Isaacson, CEO and CTO of CodeFutures Corporation

[Read the full Q&A session from Cloud Computing Journal here.]


Big Data Can Spawn New Products and Services

"Big Data comes in many varieties and is so much more than just structured data; it can include unstructured data like video, audio, and click streams, and because of this variety we envision businesses innovating and creating new ways to not just analyze this data, but harness it to create opportunities for new products and services. Up until now it has been extremely difficult to harvest this variety of mass data, but with advances in supercomputing, virtualization, and solid state storage technology, it's now feasible to process and manage Big Data in a way that creates new possibilities that didn't exist before."

Alex Mei, Executive VP and CMO of OCZ Technology Group

[Read the full Q&A session from Cloud Computing Journal here.]


The Post-Big Data Enterprise Integration Landscape

"I envision a post-Big Data enterprise integration landscape where real-time business services are analytics-enriched, exposed through secure APIs, and accessible to mobile devices, web apps, and B2B consumers."

Matt McLarty, Vice President, Client Solutions at Layer 7 Technologies

[Read the full Q&A session from Cloud Computing Journal here.]


Big Data Will Shape All Our Futures

"Big Data analytics will shape the form of nearly every process going forward in time, from the color of the latest fashions, what the candidates say in one town versus another to the chemical composition of the latest super drug."

Steve Knodl, Director of Product Management at NextIO

[Read the full Q&A session from Cloud Computing Journal here.]


The Ever-Expanding Role of Big Data

"Big Data analysis has been used in fluid mechanics to create new aircraft, in structural analysis to build cars and buildings, and in bio-informatics for the creation of new drugs and treatments. The use of Big Data in predictive analytics enables the creation of new services and outreach campaigns"

Dr. William L. Bain, founder and CEO of ScaleOut Software

[Read the full Q&A session from Cloud Computing Journal here.]