It is the season for predictions, so CBR has compiled some exclusive comment regarding big data predictions for 2016.

1. The year of predictive analytics

Mark Darbyshire, Chief Technologist at SAP UKI: "With the dawn of the ‘zettabyte era’, and the world churning out more than a trillion gigabytes of data, 2016 will see businesses looking to predictive analytics to uncover trends and patterns and gain unprecedented insight into customers, businesses and markets.

"This will allow them to go beyond reaction, to anticipating and shaping better business outcomes. Insurance company Aviva, for example, is using predictive analytics to target the right customers, from their 31 million-strong customer base, with the right offers at the right time."

2. Cognitive machines

Chetan Dube, CEO, IPsoft: "I believe a tectonic shift in the relationship between man and machine is imminent. As the intelligence of cognitive systems matures it will carry humans to higher planes of creative thinking.

"These cognitive machines are going to redefine the business landscape. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if within the next 10 years, you will walk down the corridor past a co-worker and not know if they are human or machine.

"This may sound a little farfetched to some but we are on the cusp of a second industrial revolution – one that will see huge changes to the global workforce where we combine digital labour with human labour.

"As cognitive agents become more intelligent and behave in the same way as humans, but with the power of superhuman scale and speed, we remove the shackles that bind humans to repetitive chores. It marks a seminal moment in our evolution."

3. A focus on value

Gareth Martin, Analytics Portfolio Lead EMEA, HPE: "Organisations are assessing the success of their Big Data programs and realise that without a specific focus on the value from analytic solutions, they don’t tend to break even as quickly as planned, or at all.

"Rather than build a data lake, companies are moving toward building analytic labs to focus on value-based solutioning."

4. Overcoming the limits of legacy systems

Bob Wiederhold, Couchbase CEO: "In 2016, we’ll see more enterprises re-platform their data management systems using NoSQL to overcome the limits of their 30-year old legacy relational systems.

"Mobile applications must be fast, responsive and reliable to meet end users demanding expectations. To meet these demands, mobile developers are no longer building applications for the best case performance scenario, they are building apps for the worst case scenario – guaranteeing an ideal mobile experience regardless if connectivity is ideal or spotty.

"To stay competitive, companies will take an offline first mobile development approach so business performance is no longer tied to uncontrollable network performance."

5. Salaries to skyrocket

Mike Maciag, COO, Altiscale: "Salaries for both data scientists and Hadoop admins will skyrocket in 2016 as growth in Hadoop demand exceeds the growthof the talent pool.

"In order to bypass the need to hire more data scientists and Hadoop admins from a highly competitive field, organizations will choose fully managed cloud services with built-in operational support.

"This frees up existing data science teams to focus their talents on analysis instead of spending valuable time wrangling complex Hadoop clusters."