Big Data has grown from a promise into a business reality in the last four years, writes former Wikibon Analyst Jeff Kelly in his final Wikibon Professional Alert. Kelly (below right) left Wikibon on Friday for another opportunity.

When Kelly joined Wikibon in 2011, Big Data was still in its technological infancy, with core technologies like Hadoop and NoSQL still under development and only a distant object on the enterprise IT horizon.

Over four years those technologies have matured rapidly, and an ecosystem of often Open Source tools have been built around them. Major vendors such as IBM have joined the Big Data community, while Hadoop-based companies like Cloudera, Inc. have grown rapidly, driving the technology itself and adoption by early movers.

Measured another way, in 2011 the Big Data market was pegged at $7 billion. By 2014 it had grown to $27 billion in total hardware, software and professional services, and that growth is not slowing. Start-ups have emerged at every layer of the Big Data stack from Hadoop distribution vendors to data transformation specialists and NoSQL databases.

But the real indication that this market is real is the increasing number of real-world use cases that have surfaced on theCUBE, among other places, over the last year. Kelly embeds videos of interviews with TrueCar, Inc. in the used car market, Halliburton Co. in oil and gas, Spotify AB in personalized music, the San Francisco Giants and the Congressional Budget Office.

Big Data, he concludes, is real and delivering real business value. Companies can leverage it to differentiate themselves in their markets and gain competitive advantage today. Some already are, and many more will follow.

Kelly’s survey of Big Data case histories is available, along with several other pieces of his analysis of the Big Data Market, on the new Wikibon Premium Web site.