Big data is speeding its demise. The CEO of Pivotal tells Om Malik that the old guard can’t handle it – starting with infrastructure. Telcos, for one, are especially challenged.

What does the future hold? “We’re beginning to see what can happen when all the machines in the world are connected to the Internet – radical change.”

I say no — too distracting. Let people track the stream on their own. Attention should be on the speakers.

Rob Bearden, CEO of Hortonworks, says the software portion of the market will by $24 billion by 2017 and $50 billion by 2020. And Hadoop will be processing "half of all big data" by 2020. "It will create even more value than early ERP." And he must have said Hortonworks is "an enterprise-viable platform" twelve times… 🙂

In his opening remarks, Paul Walborsky, CEO at Gigaom, says "Big Data has legs — it's here to stay."  Derrick Harris says, "Every year I say I'm excited — this year I mean it." Actual applications!  [@BigDataWild likes that… 🙂 ]

Joe Weinman, emcee (shown), note that Structure Data is, ironically, actually more about *unstructured* data.