Big data has become a buzzword in the enterprise space, and it looks like the same is happening among midsized companies. While these get much less quantities of data, they can analyze and gain insight from compared to the enterprise, a new study of over than 3,000 chief information officers by IBM found that business analytics tops the priority list of 63 percent of midmarket CIOs.

“CIOs of midsize companies are harnessing data warehousing  (64%), visual dashboards (64%), master data management (63%), and client analytics (63%) to get on top of turning data into actionable information.”

The IBM report also highlighted that CIOs are looking into ways to better utilize both structured and unstructured data. It’s this “the phenomenal growth of interest by companies” that has driven Teradata to announce an upcoming webcast called “Big Data Analytics Comes of Age: How to unlock the potential of multi-structured data.” In a press release, the company citied a March 2011 IDC report that recommends business to given the highest priority to quantities analysts when using a data warehouses.

Another company that puts an emphasis on big data is startup Calxeda. Calxeda will debut its power-efficient ARM based server technology sometime this year, and today it has unveiled its  Calxeda Trailblazer Initiative partner initiative. When released, the integrators and ISVs that signed up will be able to use the start-up’s technology.

Calxeda is developing an ARM-base server that will consume only 5 Watts of power. The startup is taking a standard ARM quad-core processor, building up an entire integrated stack on top of it and placing 120 of these units into a 2U rack.  The two focuses of the Trailblazer Initiative include Hadoop and the Cassendra open source distributed database project, both of which are gaining support in the cloud and developer community.

Talking from a different view point on big data, Strata chair Ed Dumbill talked about how it comes to play with the evolution of the semantic web and search – Google in particular.  The semantic web sees great potential in big data, driving processing power demands and seeking new ways of crunching information in order to gain insight and provide improvements around computed results.