I think Big Data is about convincing companies they need to upgrade their "tools" and purchase your software or services, or convincing managers in other departments you, the Big Data team, are doing valuable work. It's primarily hype-driven. Classic IT.

Most money will be made not by exploiting actually the "big data", but by exploiting the perceived need to collect and exploit it. We'll succeed in the former, but not necessarily in the later. It's more about keeping pace with one's competitors. "If they're doing it, we need to be doing it too."

Lots of meetings with presentations that will use "big data". But few results that ever come out of that data.