His company, which once relied on large databases, has bet instead on smaller, distributed databases that can maintain instantaneous, wireless connections to a company.

FORBES: Data Of Reckoning

Our current respondents had a well-distributed mix of applications, with databases (orange) and OLTP (blue) indicated by 63% of the responses, and other applications dividing the rest, as shown Figure 1.

FORBES: How Many IOPS -- We Need More Survey Participants

The a significant number of organizations could probably make quite a bit of hay from using Splunk, a distributed software for distilling and analyzing machine data that can be applied to data in file systems, in databases, or in Hadoop clusters.

FORBES: Will Data Science Become the New Bottleneck?