Here's a wake up call. The Boston Consulting Group has predicted that by 2025 as much as a quarter of jobs currently available will be replaced by either smart software or robots . After all, who would've thought that designing emojis for Facebook could be a job, and a well-paying one at that, a decade ago? But it's not just the nature of jobs that has changed. It's also the kind of information that is valued by companies that has had a major shift. So, whether it's a channel deciding which new program to launch, or monitoring sports performance, the decision-makers are asking for Big Data.

Little wonder then, that Big Data has become the buzzword everywhere. From Harvard to Stanford to India's very own SP Jain School of Global Management, Data Science and Big Data have become a big lure for young working professionals.

Mahendra Mehta, who teaches Big Data, concurs, "Big Data is the new game in town. It stands for data that is too voluminous, too fast or too unconventional to fit traditional data analysis architectures and applications. While in the past, the prohibitive cost of developing infrastructure for big data analytics kept big data from being utilised by smaller companies, commodity hardware, cloud architectures and open source software have now brought big data within the reach of smaller start-ups."

Such is the demand that the McKinsey Global Institute has predicted that by 2018, the US alone could face a shortage of between 140,000 to 190,000 people with deep analytical skills, and a shortage of 1.5 million managers and analysts who can leverage data analysis to make effective decisions for their organisations.

Big Data analytics can now help organisations to develop insight into data, leading to freedom from sampling and enabling an investigative approach to data. Indeed many would argue that companies that fail to take advantage of Big Data Analytics would lose their competitive edge.