Wikibon head Dave Vellante wrote up a blog post that covers his outlook for 2012, in addition to providing a reflection on his forecast for 2011. Vellante sees some of the 2011 trends expanding in 2012, in both the enterprise and the consumer space.

Big data will continue to be big in 2012, according to Vellante’s post, and we’ve seen several others’ predictions that share the same optimism. One of the main drivers is the growing VC interest, which  has already begun expressing itself in the form of all the capital that went to big data startups in 2011. The main driver though is adoption, which will take an interesting direction this year:

“Hadoop-based Big Data solutions will intersect with traditional enterprise data warehouse offerings.

The big enterprise DW/BI whales will all have solutions for Hadoop where the needles found in the haystack will end up in a traditional data warehouse. Large corporations aren’t simply going to toss their existing DW/BI infrastructure and move to a world of pure play Hadoop. Rather organizations are going to find ways to leverage the two and bring structure to unstructured data.”

Vellante believes that the competition is catching up with all the demand.  MapR, HortonWorks, EMC and other new players will be challenging Cloudera’s throne, all while an ecosystem of industry-specific apps will grow around the dominant distros.

Flash shines brighter in 2012

The second big trend in 2012 will be flash, Vellante says. Flash will drive a new cycle of innovation in the IT infrastructure, in addition to providing the performance boosts that cloud applications need in order to really take off. One example is Facebook’s use of Fusion-io technology, which brings us to another 2012 milestone for the IT industry.

One of the main things Vellante is looking forward to is Facebook’s IPO, which has a strong chance of energizing the entire IT industry (very much unlike Oracle.)