Big Data is on every CIO’s mind this quarter, and for good reason. Companies will have spent $4.3 billion on Big Data technologies by the end of 2012.But here’s where it gets interesting. Those initial investments will in turn trigger a domino effect of upgrades and new initiatives that are valued at $34 billion for 2013, per Gartner. Over a 5 year period, spend is estimated at $232 billion.What you’re seeing right now is only the tip of a gigantic iceberg.Big Data is presently synonymous with technologies like Hadoop, and the “NoSQL” class of databases including Mongo document stores and Cassandra key-values.  Today it’s possible to stream real-time analytics with ease. Spinning clusters up and down is a relative cinch, accomplished in 20 minutes or less. We have table stakes.

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