Big Data’s been an unavoidable buzz word in 2012, but what will 2013 bring?  Jeff Kelly concludes his three-part session on the SiliconAngle Newsdesk with a brief summary of what we’ve seen so far this year, and what we can expect in the next 12 months.

Kelly observes that more and more sectors and industries are adopting data analytics. It’s not just retailers and financial institutions anymore – the government is getting in on the action, too. NASA and intelligence agencies are leading the charge, and Kelly expects others to jump on the bandwagon in the coming years; the opportunity is certainly there.

He believes that data analytics could greatly benefit social services providers who need to focus their resources and customize treatment on a per-individual basis. The same goes for healthcare, a broader field where data science could also be applied to patient diagnosis and drug development.

He names education as another sector that needs to leverage data in order to move forward. Kelly says that a better understanding of student behavior and performance would allow schools and teachers to modify the curriculum to better suit struggling students.

These are but a few of the many use cases that the Wikibon analyst expects to emerge in 2013, thanks in great part to the accelerated growth of the big data industry. He says that it’s this rapid expansion that will allow vendors to focus less on component-level innovation and more on creating applications that offer real, tangible value to end users.

Kelly briefly touches on the hack/reduce initiative before moving on to talk about the environmental impact of data centers. He observes that cloud computing and big data drive the increase in IT resource consumption, but stresses that they are also a part of the solution.

Cloud service providers such as Amazon use up a lot more power than the average IT department, but their facilities are considerably more efficient.  The reason is that they leveraged virtualization and analytics to greatly increase hardware utilization and detect even the smallest of inefficiencies.