Wikibon analyst Jeff Kelly has drawn out the likely big data trends we’ll be seeing as we head deeper into 2012: many of which have already set root last year, and are currently growing to accommodate the sharply climbing demand.

Kelly’s first forecast is that the positive competition in this space will continue to expand and result in much more innovation, an estimate that is rather hard to refute from historical point of view. New players will emerge, and will fuse the current functionality of Hadoop platforms with the newer elements required by data scientists: a strong collaborative element for one.

On top of all that, Wikibon expects 2012 to be the year when the cloud and big data converge.

“A key concept behind Hadoop is that it is more efficient to process Big Data where it lives (distributed data processing) than to collect and process the data in a central location, such as an enterprise data warehouse. It follows then that the cloud is an ideal environment for Big Data processing and analytics, as much of the social media and other unstructured data that enterprises want to mine for insights lives in the cloud.”

Next up are appliances. Kelly expects big data appliances to gain momentum as adoption in new verticals picks up, and in a way this particular trend has already kicked off. EMC recently revealed a Greenplum Hadoop-powered Isilon appliance that falls under this category.

The two remaining bulletins in the article are also growing. Firstly the Hadoop ecosystem is starting to address the shortage in talent by creating new certification and education programs, such as the one Cloudera announced not long ago. And secondly, public concern is already knocking on the door.

Privacy advocates will soon start honing in on big data analytics, in light of recent events such as Target’s pregnancy guesstimate scandal.