Either way, factories have to take advantage of new capabilities enabled by the increasingly rapid convergence of mobility, real-time complex data processing and analytics, cloud based services and machine-to-machine intelligence.

FORBES: Will Your Next Car Drive Itself?

Fast Data is the continuous access and processing of events and data in real-time for the purposes of gaining instant awareness and instant action.

FORBES: Fast Data Gets A Jump On Big Data

Palmer said rumors abound of Yahoo and Google releasing more real-time processing technologies for working in real-time with big data, and Streambase plans some specific product announcements in a month or so.

FORBES: Financial Services Lags Behind Gaming in Technology

And the reality is, there is more batch processing and post-process reporting in Big Data applications (vs. real-time capabilities) than insiders want to admit.

FORBES: Hadoop Alpha Geeks Disrupting The Rapidly Growing Big-Data Market

The first successful big data technology was enterprise data warehouses that implement massively parallel processing, scale to the petabytes, handle batch and real-time latencies with equal agility, and provide connectors to structured and unstructured sources.

FORBES: How to Avoid a Hadoop Hangover