The European Technology Platform for Software and Services NESSI, together with partners from the FP7 project Big, have drafted a Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda (SRIA) on Big Data Value. The objective of the SRIA is to describe the main research challenges and needs for advancing Big Data Value in Europe in the next 5 to 10 years. The SRIA will be an important channel for providing input to the European Big Data Value Partnership that aims to establish a Public Private Partnership on Big Data Value.

Big Data is one of the key research and strategy topics for the world of business. Now 24 Institutes of the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, Europe's largest organisation for applied research, have come together to pool their expertise in the new Big Data Alliance, creating a single point of contact for companies, politics and research. 

Today, analysts seek to derive insight from large, heterogeneous, high-velocity (i.e., big) data sets using varying data analysis methods. These data sets are ubiquitous. They arise due to burgeoning cloud computing services, the anticipated Internet of Services (IoS), and the emerging Internet of Things (IoT). Big data is often defined as any data set that cannot be handled using today’s widely available mainstream solutions, techniques, and technologies.

As announced in the European Data Forum 2014 - in the networking session on 20 March organized by the European Technology Platform NESSI and the FP7 Project Big - a public consultation on the Big Data Value Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda will soon be opened here under the tab "consultation".We are looking forward to hearing your views - stay tuned!

30 million Euro support provided by the federal government.

Supporting the competitiveness of the industry in the middle of the technical transition to the Internet of Things and Industry 4.0, German’s Federal Ministry of Education and Research will establish two new competence centres for Big Data and IT security. 

Inaugurating the TeraLab Platform on 4^th February 2014, the Institut Mines-Télécom and Confederation of Schools for Economics and Statistics (GENES) expanded their collaborative research in the field of Big Data. Through the TeraLab initiative, these two institutional partners aim to provide the national research community, and of course businesses, with an environment conducive to research and experimentation focused on innovative applications and industrial prototypes.

The programme of the European Data Forum 2014 will cover different aspects of Big Data such as technical, application and socio-economic issues related to open data, linked data and Big Data. An important focus of EDF 2014 will be the establishment of a strong and vibrant European data community and ecosystem.

According to Wikibon (a professional community which gives free advisory knowledge regarding technology and business topics through open source sharing), 2013 spending on Big Data (hardware, software, services etc.) reached $ 18.6 billion and resulted in a market growth of 58% over 2012.