Big Data will flood the planet in 2012

I read the report. I think they had the big ideas right, but the quantification of the opportunity was a bit hand wavey.

The biggest chunk of that $300 billion was clinical operations, which they said would lead to a $165 Billion savings. They never explained HOW they came up with this $165 billion number, they just asserted it. This category would include things like an IBM Watson helping doctors to diagnose patients, or automated programs to help avoid adverse reactions when the doctor prescribes a drug that he shouldn't have.

As important as I think these technologies are, I highly doubt they'll be reducing healthcare expenditure in the U.S. by $165 billion.

Actually, it's more than that (e.g., http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp1109649) but there are two serious bottlenecks: you need medical experts and the data might be too noisy. This means that any medical data mining project will cost a lot of money and half-way in the project you will find out that your data has too much noise. Most people don't want to take that risk, despite that benefits might be enormous.

TL;DR: yes it's BS but nothing that high-risk/high-ROI startups couldn't deal with.

My thoughts exactly. "Big Data" gets a lot of lip service from hardware and software vendors, but for the most part they are pushing solutions to problems that 99.9% of people do not have. Most shops can't even get a basic data warehouse and BI tool up and running AND have their customers/users be happy with the solution. The idea that those same teams now need to start using special tools to analyze their 'big data' and hire data engineers/data scientists to do it is absurd.

It seems to be a confusing comparison to Big Oil or Big Pharma etc.

In other words, it's a buzzphrase coined by people who appreciate catchiness over actual meaning: the people who are a few layers removed from making important decisions and have little else to do but talk incessantly about an obvious trend.