The past few days featured the usual handful of big data updates, in addition to providing a bit of foresight that reaffirms the optimism that this space is witnessing today.

First up is MapR’s update – the Hadoop distributor has Cloudera, Greenplum and others to compete with, and it’s branching out in an attempt to get ahead of its rivals in at least one area.

Right now most of the big data buzz surrounds Fortune 500 companies and other larger enterprises – those with the resources to support a Hadoop deployment, which is a very pricey undertaking all-around.  But smaller organizations are also interested in doing something with their data, and MapR decided to team up with AWS to help them do just that. The company is making its distribution available on the Amazon Elastic MapReduce service with pay-as-you-go pricing.

The same day MapR revealed its new plans, SAP announced a big data initiative of its own. The software giant debuted a set of new offerings for the banking industry that bundle together services and HANA, the firm’s increasingly popular in-memory analytics appliance.

The financial services segment is among the fastest adopters of the big data trend, but it’s far from being the only one. Data is even being leveraged in political campaigns in an effort find out what voters want. There bottom line is that there’s a lot of growth going on, and Lucid Imagination CEO Paul Dosher believes that this momentum won’t waver anytime soon.

In a Cube interview the executive said that his firm expects analytics will become a $50 billion market by 2017, and Lucid is one of the players that are actively trying to capitalize on this fact.