Virtualization and Cloud executives share their predictions for 2013.  Read them in this VMblog.com series exclusive.

Contributed article by Larry Warnock, CEO of Gazzang

2013 - Big Data Coming of Age

We're at a unique point in time, where the technology that's available to us today has caught up with the rising flood of data being created.

Open Source databases like Hadoop, Cassandra, MongoDB and others allow us to harness the exabytes of unstructured information captured from mobile devices, social media, log files, emails, images and video, and use it to perform real-time analytics. This is Big Data.

As the big data market continues to mature, more enterprises are deploying big data projects to drive better business intelligence, product development, and customer service, just to name a few. As these projects graduate from proof-of-concept to implementation, customers have to navigate an increasingly complex landscape of data management and analytics tools, from discovery to security to workload optimization, and more. And it's only going to get more complicated as the pace of big data picks up.

Looking ahead to 2013, I've got a few predictions about how these trends will shake out: 

• Higher integration of structured and unstructured data will lead to greater insights for organizations of varying sizes and industries, and drive even greater adoption of big data.
• Product differentiation will be focused less on infrastructure and more on application and service layers. As a result, more big brands will start to open-source their architecture to encourage adoption and attract development talent, similar to what Netflix and Disney are already doing.
• The massive computing and storage resources required to support big data make cloud environments an ideal fit. OpenStack is not overhyped as suggested by Gartner, but will succeed as an alternative to Amazon by providing security features such as default encryption and cloud entropy/randomization, and deliver solutions for companies that want on-premises cloud infrastructure.
• As encryption and multi-factor authentication become more broadly adopted for big data security, key management will become the new challenge. Solutions will need to provide strong policy enforcement and compliance capabilities, while maintaining high levels of flexibility and availability.

It's going to be an exciting year in the big data space. I look forward to seeing you out there, and being a part of it.

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About the Author

Larry Warnock is CEO of Gazzang, responsible for the company's leadership, operations and strategic direction. He is the former president and CEO of Phurnace Software (acquired by BMC Software in 2009), and also held roles as chief marketing officer at Vignette, and vice president of marketing at OnLink Technologies (acquired by Siebel Systems). He brings more than 27 years of operational expertise working with startups and established technology companies to his role at Gazzang, particularly in the enterprise software and data center tools markets.