So here are few predictions that we could summarize based on what we have covered in our journal since a year and what the new year is going to turn out further.

Real Time Processing Of Data

Big Data is set to go big in 2013 for real time and in-memory data processing. According to a recent survey from Gigaspaces, a provider of application virtualization platforms, has revealed that out of 70% who responded that they are using big data software only 12% are using real-time processing software. This sure is a gap that is going to be closed in 2013 specifically with the investments available towards end of this year to startups and established player alike. 

Vertical Based Big Data Analytics

2012 has not just seen plain hadoop driven architectures but much more on top of hadoop drvien by Cloudera, Oracle, Splunk, MapR and many more offering analytics expertise. Retail, Finance, HealthCare are few sectors which have seen tremendous adoption of big data driven solutions for their businesses. This calls for a vertical specific data analytics solutions for coming years to identify the patterns, common approach and trends within the vertical that businesses can benefit from. 2013 probably will be the year when such dedicated solutions will start to evolve.

POC to Reality Across Enterprises

Most of the enterprises have done a preliminary proof of concepts on their big data plans within 2012, which after the success this year has seen, are going to get serious and spend heavily to publish their data driven architectures. It probably is a mandate than an option for enterprises to go for big data driven enterprise architectures to gain that ounce of advantage to understand their customers and processes better.

Cloudify Big Data

Over 44% who have been surveyed have said that they would be keen to move their big data apps to cloud than in house. Coupled with few companies like Amazon offering critical services like "warehouse as a service" via Amazon Redshift, will encourage startups and small businesses to availa such services to move to cloud.  Assuming the major concerns to move to cloud like security, scalability will reduce as time passes by with more robust cloud offerings, businesses will be keen to leverage the power of cloud and cloudify their big data solutions.

Acquisitions And Alliances

With numerous startups and partnerships coming along in 2012, if we have to go by the trend of investments, acquisitions and partnerships within big data space in last few months, the companies will continue to invest, acquire and partner heavily next year. For enterprises who are behind the curve, the best way to gain quick expertise offering big data services is to acquire, integrate and/or partner. Cloud and big data providers have been expanding their reach into Europe and Asia towards later 2012 and with investments received, this hopefully will drive more alliances through the new year.