's impressive demonstrated the awesome strides in computing power and ingenuity, but just as impressive was the way in which Watson's creators attacked an avalanche of information to come out victorious. Notably, Watson wasn't concerned with alone.

"Big data" is often cited as the core problem holding back companies from gaining a competitive advantage in this age of information overflow. Most organizations are fairly adept at capturing that information, but what ultimately matters is what they do with it, how quickly they utilize it to glean value. This is "big analytics." And though Watson is clearly a different animal than database analytics solutions for business, fundamentally, Watson is big analytics.

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Working from just a single terabyte of data, at incredibly high speeds to come up with correct answers. For those of us in the business of data storage and analytics -- in fact, most companies -- this illustrated the power and challenge of big analytics, not just big data.