This conference will take an in-depth look at what it takes to capitalize on Big Data technologies.

The "Big Data" phenomenon seems to have appeared from almost nowhere, but in reality, some aspects of this emerging trend are not new. We have known about the exponential growth of data volumes for some time and according to a recent IDC Digital Universe study published in June 2011, the amount of information created and replicated will surpass 1.9 zettabytes (1.8 trillion gigabytes) in 2011, growing by almost nine times in just five years.

Other aspects of "Big Data" are indeed new.

The variety of the data sources is growing at a rapid rate, particularly as we move into the semi-structured and unstructured realm (e.g. social media interactions, rich media files and geospatial information).

The other emerging factor that organizations need to contend with is the increased velocity at which data is being generated (e.g. real-time sensor data feeds from smart meters).
These new aspects of 'Big Data' are creating unprecedented levels of complexity for IT executives, particularly as they realize that these massive data sets cannot be processed, managed and analyzed using traditional databases and architectures.

In line with this trend, CIOs and IT departments are looking at a major reassessment of both infrastructure (primarily leveraging high performance computing, in memory technologies and massively parallel processing (MPP) architectures) and information management (particularly in the analytics space) strategies in face of heightened expectations from Line of Business (LoB) executives.