"The wind is brewing around [big data]. My personal opinion is that the drive behind this is... probably from some of the very large US-based organisations - like Google - in terms of wanting to go through and get the compute working with the storage in a highly optimised way."

Vendors are vying for the prize too. IBM's $USD1.7 billion acquisition of Netezza in September last year coincided with simultaneous acquisitions from EMC of Isilon for $USD2.25 billion and Greenplum for an undisclosed sum between July and November 2010.

Oracle too has begun to build its optimised data warehousing and analysis capabilities, in hopes of securing contracts as soon as companies voice their requirements.

"We're already talking with a lot of companies in Australia and in other markets," president of EMC's Asia Pacific and Japan region, Steve Leonard, said.

"The expectation for us is, as we do a good job of communicating [big data] to the market, and as the market says 'we can do that', that's going to be one of those sort of growth slopes."