It’s been an exciting 12 months for IT, with disruptive new trends once confined to the open source community finally cracking the surface of the traditional enterprise. We can expect to see more of that in 2014, a year that the industry’s most prominent voices agree will mark a turning point for technology innovation.

At the heart of this tectonic shift is Big Data, a strategic asset of unprecedented value capable of empowering decision makers to become more productive and refocus on generating value for their organizations. Accordingly, tomorrow’s analytical technologies will be designed to meet the fast evolving requirements of these business users, first and foremost providing seamless integration and the ability to access data from multiple sources, relational as well as non-relational. The flood of new solutions will create more choice than ever before for practitioners, but complexity is also bound to increase as the ecosystem continues to grow.

For end users, 2014 will be defined by the pursuit of both functionality and simplicity, with the latter taking the form of API-driven cloud services and sophisticated abstraction layers equipped with structured querying capabilities to tame the explosive growth in information volumes. SQL-on-Hadoop will continue to gain traction in the coming year, according to Xplenty co-founder and CTO Saggi Neumann, as will predictive analytics, a trend that Alpine Data Labs’ Steven Hillion sees taking over the retail sector by storm. Consumer facing companies will tap into their data for greater visibility of their customers, insight that they will have to safeguard from increasingly aggressive cyber attacks.

For this reason, MapR chief exec John Schroeder expects security to become even bigger priority for CIOs in 2014, with search and data quality moving up the agenda in tandem. As the lynchpin of Big Data, Hadoop will be reshaped by these shifts and propel open source analytics even deeper into the enterprise.