Here’s one good news for big data companies, data analytics consulting professionals, data consulting services, Hadoop consulting professionals and other professionals and firms who are into big data services: 2017 will likely be a great year for you!

Over recent years, big data has broken out of just being a buzzword to one of the technologies that businesses rely on in order to stay competitive. We have seen trends and technologies come, some of them stayed and some of them went. For 2017, here are the things that you should expect in big data.

Big data consulting professionals and the biggest names in big data shares their predictions, and who better to start with than Balaji Thiagarajan, vice president for big data at Oracle.

According to Thiagarajan:

1. Machine learning will be available and used everywhere.

Machine learning had a big part in Amazon’s re:Invent for 2016, introducing several services for AWS that uses artificial intelligence and machine learning. Thiagarajan says that machine learning will be ubiquitous, allowing businesses to use machine learning with huge amounts of data. This would also mean that machine learning will become more powerful and more tools will invade the market, eventually all businesses in every industry (from energy to insurance) will use the technology.

2. Applications will urge more businesses to adopt big data.

Right now, enterprises are focused on analytics, or how they could analyze and make sense of the huge influx of data that they get. Businesses have been looking at how to process data, and what insights they could get from the data they have. In 2017, however, the focus will shift on creating applications that will make use of the data and the analytics to respond to business-driven and industry specific needs.

3. These applications will work with the Internet of Things (IoT).

As more and more people use connected devices, applications getting data from these devices deliver better and more services to customers. These data sources and other inputs will be paired with real-time analytics and machine learning. This means that big data will be more useful not just to a business customer, but also to smart cities around the world.

4. Apache’s Kafka will be bigger in 2017.

Kafka has been introduced as a distributed streaming platform that allows users to publish and subscribe to streams of data. We have seen several businesses using it in 2016, but adoption is likely to increase in 2017.

5. Pre-packaged and integrated cloud data systems would see a boom.

Although there are businesses now that are deriving a lot of advantages and benefits from data labs and end-to-end platform, the adoption has been quite dismal.   This is because it is not easy, or cheap, to do this from scratch, even on the cloud. This is why in 2017, prepackaged and integrated data services living in the cloud will see an uptick in adoption. More and more businesses will be taking advantage of these services, including data science, data flow, data lake, data integration, and data analytics. These would be very simple even though they are DIY services.

Thiagarajan advises organizations to be ready to take advantage of the technologies and trends that will come out in 2017 in order to come out ahead.

Other experts have their own predictions, too.

For one, Qubole CEO Ashish Thusoo thinks that big data will be growing with the cloud. Enterprises will realize that it will not be practical to keep big data onsite as you would need to manage an ever growing data center and other infrastructure. Instead, big data initiatives will be placed on the cloud and in 2017, we will see a lot of businesses doing just that. Thusoo also says that most of these cloud-based big data projects will use self-service offerings so that everybody in the company can access the data and get the insights they need for their business decisions.

Several experts agree with Thiagarajan regarding the role of the Internet of Things in big data, analytics and business-driven applications.

However, other experts are more concerned about the security vulnerabilities that come with the increased use of IoT devices. LANDESK’s vice president of engineering, Rob Juncker, sites the DYN DDos that happened in 2016 to illustrate the point that IoT devices can shut down the Internet. Aperio Systems’ Michael Shalyt thinks that political pressure will make security a top priority, as President-elect Donald Trump has made it his priority aim for his first 100 days in office.

Meanwhile, Webroot’s senior vice president for product strategy and technology alliances, Chad Bacher, thinks that we would be seeing ransomware cropping up on IoT devices in 2017, even to the point that these devices are used by cybercriminals and hackers to learn more about their victims and then blackmail them into paying up.

Big data jobs in 2017

Michael Stonebraker, who is the chief technology officer and co-founder of Tamr, thinks that qualified data scientists will still be scarce in 2017 and will continue to be such until 2019 or later. Stonebreaker thinks that this would be a major reason why universities would have some sort of data science program starting in 2017. Other jobs that would be in high demand in big data include IoT architects, according to Dan Graham, Internet of Things Technical Marketing Specialist at Teradata. And, according to Thusoo, these would include data engineers, too.

For big data companies, it just means that there will be no shortage of work in the coming year. For businesses, it means that if you still have not looked into big data, you might have to play catch up.

The good news is that there are big data strategy consulting companies that you can contact. Call Four Cornerstone now at (817) 377-1144 or fill out our contact form to find out what we can do for you when it comes to big data. We can be your big data consulting partner! We can suggest, set up and maintain big data solutions for you, all the while tailoring it to your needs.

Photo courtesy of Andrew Hart.