According toeMarketer’s new report Key Digital Trends for 2014, the rapid emergence of the everywhere, always-connected consumer puts pressure on marketers, as expectations about the speed with which marketers need to respond to expressions of interest across the customer journey are growing - from the consideration phase all the way through to post-sales service. In fact, consumers expect instant interactions, whether it is a relevant offer or an answer to a customer service query, heralding that the days of 24- or 48-hour response times are overonce and for all.

However,increasing consumer expectations of immediacy requires a combination of several factors: Although automation helps marketers to establish a presence with consumers across the purchase cycle, wherever they may be and whatever they may be doing, automated purchasing of display ads (whether served on websites or appearing in a smart device app) is just one piece of the puzzle. A related need is to ensure that those ads show up in the right place and on the right device. Therefore, a key task for marketers involves recalibrating their efforts in line with the device-shifting behavior of their audiences.

Of coursemarketers in generalexpect that smarter applications of data will help them respond faster and better to business challenges. Especially when it comes to real-time efforts, marketers hope to drive increases in engagement with their often-elusive audience.A corollary is that marketing campaigns overall are becoming more interdependent across channels, which in return, however, should pay dividends in terms of greater responsiveness to time-, place- and device-shifting consumers.

And all this is occurring as SQL and Hadoop platforms are diversifying, adopting multiple personalities, and providing overlapping functions in 2014, according to Tony Baer,Ovum’s principal analyst of Software – Enterprise Solutions.

“The rationale is a mix of providing convenience, leveraging familiarity with SQL, and providing unified management over diverse analytic workloads. By bundling multiple engines, management of diverse analytic workloads becomes more convenient,” Baer says. However, he adds, “The drawback is that some of these engines or approaches are quite early in development; in many cases, implementations are still proprietary.”

For Big Data and Fast Data, the path for creation of a new applications market is mostly following the “visionary” model, because a legacy of custom programming for applications did not exist in the past. An emerging breed of Hadoop-based applications converge multiple sources of data, providing predictive analytics for customer experience solutions that could be used for cross-selling, upselling, and recommendations.

Baer states, “The flip side is that Ovum expects continued growth of the Fast Data applications market in 2014. The applications heavily leverage DRAM or SSD/Flash, or both to embed complex analytics and simulation capabilities into transaction applications.”

Ovum predicts that there is NoSQL life beyond Hadoop. NoSQL platforms such as MongoDB and Cassandra are poised for a breakout for Fast Data Internet applications. Besides that, the analyst firm believes more players will join the fray and some even on Hadoop.

“Look out for document-centric data stores, such as MongoDB, as they empower the next generation of web applications. JSON may fulfill the promise that XML was supposed to deliver for structuring all that ‘other’ data that SQL was never able to easily accommodate,” concludes Baer.

It’s good to see that technologies and business environment seem to reach a certain level of maturity, as the amount of data is expected to increase at 40% annually and Big Data even becomesmore important for the years to come.

By MediaBUZZ