According to the Big Data In Big Companies by Thomas, H.D. and Jill,D, Big data is a popular term used to describe the exponential growth and availability of data, both structured and unstructured. And big data may be as important to business – and society – as the Internet has become.

Big data could be defined as the three Vs, volume, velocity and variety.

Big data has increased the demand of information management specialists in that Software AG, Oracle Corporation, IBM, FICO, Microsoft, SAP, EMC, HP and Dell have spent more than $15 billion on software firms specializing in data management and paralytics. 

Developed economies make increasing use of data-intensive technologies. There are 4.6 billion mobile-phone subscriptions worldwide and between 1 billion and 2 billion people accessing the internet.^[1] Between 1990 and 2005, more than 1 billion people worldwide entered the middle class which means more and more people who gain money will become more literate which in turn leads to information growth. The world’s effective capacity to exchange information through telecommunicationnetworks was 281 petabytes in 1986, 471 petabytes in 1993, 2.2 exabytes in 2000, 65 exabytes in 2007 and it is predicted that the amount of traffic flowing over the internet will reach 667 exabytes annually by 2014. It is estimated that one third of the globally stored information is in the form of alphanumeric text and still image data, which is the format most useful for most big data applications. This also shows the potential of yet unused data (i.e. in the form of video and audio content).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_data#Market#

http://www.sas.com/en_us/insights/big-data/what-is-big-data.html

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