Senior executives have been waiting for actionable insight from the mass of information that their IT departments already gather about their customers. But many have become very impatient — because they want to see results, now. Do you anticipate that data analytics and real-time visualization will advance next year?

Ovum expects a significant wave of business technology ramp-ups in 2014, in response to the market demand. They predict a growing third-party vendor and IT services ecosystem that creates Big Data and Fast Data tools and solutions for the enterprise data warehousing and applications markets.

This growing trend is occurring as SQL and Hadoop platforms are diversifying, adopting multiple personalities, and providing overlapping functions. According to Ovum’s latest market study, SQL queries can now be run against Hadoop, and many SQL databases will be able to handle JSON document-centric queries.

And as silicon-based storage — DRAM (dynamic random-access memory) and SSD/Flash …