Big data is becoming of more importance now. It’s growing (literally) and is becoming necessary for enterprises to determine how data can work for them.  They also need to determine the best ways to manage their data. In fact, it has become the hot topic of the moment–something we’ve certainly been hearing about a great deal at the O’Reilly Strata Conference. While Big Data is going to be even bigger in 2011 (by as much as 44 times), here we have few keynotes from some industry experts of Real World Applications Panel at Strata.

The Real World Applications Panel: Enterprise and Industry brought four industry experts together to discuss the  importance and usage of Big Data. The panel session included Kenneth Cukier from The Economist, Adam Hurwitz from BIA, Jinesh Varia from Amazon Web Services, and Mario Veiga Pereira from PSR. These industry practitioners were seen discussing their ways of putting new tools and massive data sets to work plus what’s actually going on with data in the real world.

It’s quite interesting to know the views of these experts while each of them gives their own opinions and thoughts. Each of them told their experiences about how big data is affecting their respective industries. For instance, Varia from Amazon Web Services told about storage getting cheaper with analytics getting smarter as well as faster, from his own experiences with customers like RazorFish, Best Buy, Yelp and Etsy.  Pereira, on the other hand, talked about capacity planning as a complex issue for power companies and tools like Smart algorithms, cloud computing and big data analysis are helpful in making better decisions. He insisted the modeling of every single resource so as to bring better results related to capacity planning.

Adam Hurwitz, CIO of Business Intelligence Associates, Inc. described Big Data “has been a game changer in the legal industry. It’s a necessity if your legal department is to be successful.” Besides, how it is used in this industry and how information is crucial for every single case.  In response to Cukier’s crucial question, “Has anyone taken data they’ve generated, used it internally, and then realized that it has tangible external value?

The views of other participants were quite interesting such as energy companies exchange raw data in marketplace, some web crawling companies sell their crawl results to third parties. But yes, legal community is bit reluctant in using these tools and Big Data just because that hey had to embrace these tools to enable court-mandated e-discovery.

So, it’s all about increasing the amount of data, the rising number of options around manipulating and sharing that data. It means a growing range of industries can take advantage of that data, whether it’s to sell in a marketplace, improve their business systems, improve customer relations, figure next year’s advertising budget. Finally, the participants conclude on the point that there are several great ideas being put forth regarding real world use cases for big data. As the cloud empowers more business development around these growing data mounds, we’ll see even more pragmatism applied to real world data management.