I'm pretty suspicious of the idea that most companies have data that is too big for a non-distributed environment.

I do think that most companies log lots of data in different places without much thought or structure, and as a result need a "data scientist", who spends most of their time simply aggregating and cleaning data that can then easily be processed on a single machine. ie: they spend 10% of their time doing statistics.

Maybe I'm wrong, but the above is how all the data scientists that I know describe their work.