For those who can’t wait for next week’s Strata Hadoop World Conference in New York, when we can expect dozens of new developments in the big data world, a couple of interesting items came up yesterday courtesy of Gartner and IBM.

First up was Gartner’s latest report, which made some big noises about big data spending over the next few years. According to Gartner, big data spending worldwide is expected to hit $28 billion this year, increasing to $34 billion by 2013, with a whopping $232 billion being total spent through 2016.

Gartner says that this cash will drive a dramatic evolution in big data over the next few years. Beginning in 2015, big data will transform from the standalone category it is today into a technology that is completely mainstream, and embedded within organizational architecture as standard. By 2020, it expects that “big data features and functionality will be non-differentiating and routinely expected from traditional enterprise vendors and part of their product offerings.”

“Because big data’s effects are pervasive, big data will evolve to become a standardized requirement in leading information architectural practices, forcing older practices and technology into early obsolescence,” said Mark Beyer, research vice president at Gartner.

“As a result, big data will once again become ‘just data’ by 2020 and architectural approaches, infrastructure and hardware/software that does not adapt to this ‘new normal’ will be retired. Organizations resisting this change will suffer severe economic impacts.”

Meanwhile, IBM’s Institute for Business Value has teamed up with the Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford to author a new study: Analytics: The real-world use of big data: How innovative enterprises extract value from uncertain data.

The 20-page long publication expands on one of the biggest ever surveys asking questions about big data, quizzing no less than 1,144 IT and business professionals from 95 nations. Among the topics discussed in the paper are the definition of big data, big data’s top sources, big data infrastructure, big data analytics, and the adoption of big data. In addition, the report concludes with a number of recommendations to help organizations with their big data adoption.

Numerous interesting findings came up in the study, including that 63% of respondents apparently see the value of big data, claiming that “use of information and analytics gives them a competitive advantage”.

However, the majority of these people have been rather slow on the uptake – just 6% of those quizzed said that their big data adoption was in the “execution” phase, with a massive 47% still “exploring” the idea.