No one is questioning that the analytics industry is growing like crazy, but the specific figures are up for dispute. To be more specific, IDC recently released a big data market report that predicted this segment will balloon to $24 billion by 2016 – less than half of what Wikibon forecasted in a study released several months ago.

Big data stood at about $5 billion in early 2012, yet Wikibon expects it to reach $53.4 million in just three years’ time. If anything, this figure will only go up for the simple reason that organizations are recognizing their information as an invaluable source of competitive advantage.  This trend is backed by solid figures.

A joint study between Wikibon and VDP Finder found that big data is high on IT pros’ social priority lists.  Between August and November 2012 big data discussions accounted for 33 percent of the traffic generated by techies on Twitter, a huge spike of interest when compared to other popular topics that either declined or held steady.

Social media is far from being the only indication that the analytics industry is going strong. The fact that vendors are more competitive than ever is just as good of a sign for the industry.

Earlier this week, Toshiba introduced a new line-up of ultra secure, flash-based storage drivers. The four devices feature built-in encryption and wipe capabilities developed to handle data that is not only sensitive, but also urgent to the end user.

A day after the Japanese manufacturer’s announcement, InMobi bought out Overlay. The latter, a mobile analytics startup, was comprised primarily of data scientists that managed to produce a piece of software that quantifies user sentiment based on relevant metrics. This team is now a part of InMobi.