Big data market will be worth US$46.34 billion by end of 2018. This clearly indicates that big data is in a constant phase of growth and evolution. IDC estimates that the global revenue from big data will reach US$203 billion by 2020 and there will be close to 440,000 big data related job roles in the US alone with only 300,000 skilled professionals to fill them. Bidding adieu to 2017 and just in the third month of 2018, we look at the marked differences in the big data space what exciting may be on the horizon for big data in 2018. Tracking big data trends is just similar to monitoring the regular shifts in the wind- the moment you sense its direction, it changes. Yet the following big data trends are likely to shape up in 2018.

1) Big Data and Open Source

Forrester forecast report on big data tech market reveals that Hadoop usage is increasing 32.9% year on year. Open source big data frameworks like Hadoop, Spark and others are dominating the big data space, and that trend is likely to continue in 2018. According to the TDWI Best Practices Report, Hadoop for the Enterprise by Philip Russom, 60% of the companies plan to have Hadoop clusters running in production by end of 2018. Experts say that in 2018, many organizations will expand the use of big data frameworks like Hadoop, Spark and NoSQL technologies to accelerate big data processing. Companies will hire skilled data experts versed in tools like Hadoop and Spark so that professionals can access and respond to data in real-time through valuable business insights.

2) Big Data Analytics will Include Visualization Models

A survey of 2800 experienced BI professionals in 2017 predicted data discovery and data visualization would become a significant trend. Data discovery now is not just about understanding the analysis and relationships but also represents ways of presenting the analysis to reveal deeper business insights. Humans have greater ability to process visual patterns effectively. Compelling and captivating visualization models will become the choice for processing big data sets making it one of the most significant big data trends in 2018.

3) 2018 will be the year of Streaming Success

2018 will be the year when the goal of every organization adopting big data strategy would be to achieve true streaming analytics: the ability to process and analyze a data set while still it is in the process of creation. This means gleaning insights which are exactly up-to-the-second without having to replicate datasets. As of now, this means making a compromise with the size of the dataset or tolerating a delay but by end of 2018 organizations will be very close to removing these limits.

4) Meeting the "Dark Data" Challenge in 2018

Regardless of all the hype about the increasing data volume that we generate every day, it cannot be denied that databases across the globe remain in analog form, un-digitized, and thus unexploited for any kind of business analytics. 2018 will see increased digitization of the dark data (data that is not yet put to work) stored in the form of paper files, historical records, or any other non-digital data recording formats. This new wave of dark data will enter the cloud. Organizations will develop big data solutions that will allow them to move data easily into Hadoop from environments which are traditionally very dark such as mainframes.

5) AI and Machine Learning to be faster, smarter and more efficient in 2018

AI and Machine learning technology are growing at a lightning pace helping businesses transform through various use cases such as real-time ads, fraud detection, pattern recognition, voice recognition, etc. Machine learning was among the top 10 strategic technology trends in 2017 but 2018 will witness it beyond rule-based tradition algorithms. Machine learning algorithms will become faster and more accurate helping enterprises make more appropriate predictions.

These are just some of the top big data trends that industry experts predict, the continuously evolving nature of this domain means that we are likely to expect some surprises. Big data is pushing the technological space towards a brighter and optimized future. With increasing number of organizations jumping on the big data bandwagon, 2018 is going to be an eventful year. Here's to another great year of data-driven inventions, innovations, and discoveries.