The hype surrounding so-called “big data” technologies continued to grow in 2012. Software vendors that play in the IBM i arena and who made acquisitions or announcements related to big data last year include: Attunity, AquaFold, HiT Software, Information Builders, Jaspersoft, Lavastorm, QlikTech , and Tableau Software. The big data craze will continue in 2013, as the pace of information creation and consumption continues. To put this in perspective, IBM estimates that 2.5 exabytes, or 1,000 petabytes, of data is generated every day. By comparison, the sum of human-produced information totaled about 12 exabytes at the end of 1999, according a UC Berkeley study. Those data points plot one very imposing geometric curve, which has data management vendors salivating.