The phrase Big Data is not just a new buzzword, it's something that arrived slowly and captured the entire arena. The arrival of Hadoop and its alliance marked the end of the age for the long undefeated reign of traditional databases and warehouses.

Today, we have a humongous amount of data all around us, in each and every sector of society and the economy; talk about any industry, it's sitting and generating loads of data—for instance, manufacturing, automobiles, finance, the energy sector, consumers, transportation, security, IT, and networks. The advent of Big Data as a field/domain/concept/theory/idea has made it possible to store, process, and analyze these large pools of data to get intelligent insight, and perform informed and calculated decisions. These decisions are driving the recommendations, growth, planning, and projections in all segments of the economy and that's why Big Data has taken the world by storm.

If we look at the trends in the IT industry, there was an era when people were moving from manual computation to automated, computerized applications, then we ran into an era of enterprise level applications. This era gave birth to architectural flavors such as SAAS and PaaS. Now, we are into an era where we have a huge amount of data, which can be processed and analyzed in cost-effective ways. The world is moving towards open source to get the benefits of reduced license fees, data storage, and computation costs. It has really made it lucrative and affordable for all sectors and segments to harness the power of data. This is making Big Data synonymous with low cost, scalable, highly available, and reliable solutions that can churn huge amounts of data at incredible speed and generate intelligent insights.