Heck, back in high school one of the math competitions I won was sponsored by INFORMS (the Institute For Operations Research and the Management Sciences), and I asked my dad "What's operations research?" and he said that it's where people with math Ph.Ds go to make big bucks. Companies like FedEx, Safeway, and WalMart have relied on their massive amounts of operations data to do things like minimize transportation costs or ensure that they're stocking items with maximum demand for decades.
The thing is, everybody who gains a competitive advantage from big data has reason to keep that fact secret, so that their competitors don't start doing the same thing. What's changed now is that the media itself is facing competitors that use big data themselves to make themselves more relevant than traditional media, and so suddenly it's a Story Of Consequence. It's not that big data is the next big thing - it's that big data was the last big thing that you are only hearing about now, and suddenly a bunch of folks that had never heard of it are now trying to play catch-up.
It will also take something more than Hadoop and the like to do something real... Don't like to be that guy, but please, stop rewriting yet another query language and try to write efficient engines instead. ;)