The Strata Big Data conference begins tomorrow, so we decided it would be a good time to look back 12 months and observe the big data ecosystem then in context to where it is today. This particular industry, now easily worthy of this status when considering factors like funding and consumer adoption, is rapidly evolving. Growth is attributed to the many industry changes over the past few years, in addition to technical advancements and the increased maturity of the ecosystem.

Last year it was all about Hadoop, and this year it still is. From Jeff Kelly’s seat at the gathering last year, he looked at how the 2011 big data community started to face the growing number of new players and what routes vendors were taking. Back then it was Cloudera, MapR and Greenplum, and now – while those three remain at the very top of the food chain – we have fresher big data startups such as Skytree, not to mention interest from titans such as Oracle.

Moving on to the actual conference and keynotes: the three-day event progressed in a rather chronological order, from covering the basics (a very relative term in this context) in day one to the technicalities, challenges and advantages of Hadoop throughout Day 2. Halfway through Strata the pundits, some of the industry’s most prominent data scientists and experts, talked about the disruption big data analytics is creating in IT, and what vendors make of it.

Day 3 took a slightly different but not unexpected direction. The applications of big insight where identified, and several keynotes focused on what we can expect further down the road; in 2012. Looking back at it all, the one thing that’s safe to assume is that this year’s speakers will able to take the topics above much farther, thanks  to 12 month worth of additional insight and innovation.