Organizations are striving towards becoming more data driven and leverage data to gain the competitive advantage. It is inevitable that any current business intelligence infrastructure needs to be upgraded to include Big Data technologies and analytics needs to be embedded into every core business process. The following diagram depicts a matrix that connects requirements from low storage/cost to high storage/cost information management systems and analytics applications.

The following section lists all the capabilities that an integrated platform for Big Data analytics should have:
A data integration platform that can integrate data from any source, of any type, and highly voluminous in nature. This includes efficient data extraction, data cleansing, transformation, and loading capabilities.
A data storage platform that can hold structured, unstructured, and semi-structured data with a capability to slice and dice data to any degree, discarding the...