The 'big data' buzzword and industry trend had a pretty good year perception-wise in 2012, but the hype may soon fade into a period of disillusionment among users, according to analyst firms Ovum and Gartner. Big data refers to the ever-larger amounts of information being generated by social media, sensors, and other sources, as well as the growing range of tools such as Hadoop that are used to process it for business insights.