“In 2011, the world is ten times more instrumented than it was in 2006. The number of Internet-connected devices has leapt from 500 million to 1 trillion. We create 15 petabytes of new data every day. The rapidly increasing instrumentation of our society means we have access to tremendous streams of data. Our methods for analyzing and using that data, however, have not kept pace.”–IBM

“…for big data to really become a game-changing force in business, companies will have to develop tools for the common man — or at least the middle manager. Much like broadband, computers, electricity and other big changes in productivity, it has to filter down to the masses to really change the world.”–Stacey Higginbotham, GigaOm

“In 20 years, with all the aggregating and data mining that’s taking place now, this information will be used to cure something. It’s only a matter of time.”–Matthew Douglas, VP of engineering, Practice Fusion (quoted in Good, Fall 2011)

“Just like digitization, [big data] defines a new objective, a new focus, and a new era. It encompasses analytics, but it also encompasses all the entrepreneurial and institutional activity, the new processes and business models, the new skills and disciplines, and the new technologies and tools geared toward a new objective: extracting value from digital data and striving for better insights and decisions. Digitization made data, as the MGI says, ‘a new factor of production.’ Big data is how we apply it.”–Gil Press, AllAnalytics