It’s funny how much life can change in just one short year.  Twelve months ago the world was still grasping the concept of Big Data, exploring its applications and use cases.  In 2013 many doubters have come full circle, not only excited about Big Data, but finding innovative ways to make it work in the enterprise.  It’s a concept celebrated three times annually at the Strata conference, an event that kicked off last week.  Wikibon co-founder David Floyer discussed the biggest highlights of the Strata event in his most recent interview with Kristin Feledy on the SiliconAngle NewsDesk morning show (full video below).

Floyer observed that the overall mood at this year’s gathering was radically different than what he saw in 2012. He says that “big data doubts turned into big data deals,” speaking of the many companies that once debated the cost justification of analytics just 12 months ago were showing off their multi-million dollar projects at Strata 2013.

The Wikibon analyst also finds it notable that the industry leaders at the event were all systems vendors with portfolios that encompass both software and hardware. IBM and HP are cashing in on the big data trend, and the soon to be privatized Dell is following suite.

Besides the makeup of the gathering, several Strata announcements caught Floyer’s attention. In the hardware department, he deems DataDirect Networks’ hScaler appliance and Intel’s Hadoop offering as the two most significant debuts. On the software side, he points at Sqrrl and SiSense’s SQL-based analytics engine.

He explains that the latter offering stands out because SQL “has some constraints to scale” that make it difficult to implement in big data environments.  SiSense’s ability to overcome this barrier earned it the Best of Show award from the audience.

Moving on, the most controversial subject at Strata was Greenplum. The company received some negative attention after releasing a statement that some 300 of its engineers are “committed” to Hadoop, a critical terminology error.

“They certainly have 300 engineers, I’m sure, [but] the word committed in the open-source community has a particular meaning, Floyer says. “A committer is a very important who works with the open-source community and puts things forward. The number of committers Greenplum has is exactly zero, whereas for example Intel they have one.”

These were the biggest highlights of Strata Conference 2013. Floyer wraps up the interview with a piece of advice to big data practitioners.

“Big data is becoming strategic. From a strategic point of view CIOs, CTOs need to be looking at how they can integrate transactional and analytical systems into one. The long term strategy should be “how can I make my transactional systems work, feed data into the analytical systems in real-time, in-memory, using large amounts of flash and DRAM.  People have to think very differently about how they approach systems in 2013.”

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