Big data research: will industry solve all the problems?

The need for effective tools for big data data management and analytics continues to grow. While the ecosystem of tools is expanding many research problems remain open: they include challenges around efficient processing, flexible analytics, ease of use, and operation as a service. Many new systems and much innovation, however, come from industry (or from academic projects that quickly became big players in industry). An important question for our community is whether industry will solve all the problems or whether there is a place for academic research in big data and what is that place. In this paper, we address this question by looking back at our research on the Nuage, CQMS, Myria, and Data Pricing projects, and the SciDB collaboration.