While much focus and discussion of the so-called “Big Data revolution” has been on the data itself and the exciting new applications it is enabling — from Google’s self-driving cars through to CSIRO and University of Tasmania’s better information systems for oyster farmers — less focus has been on the underpinning technologies and the talent driving these technologies.

At the heart of the Big Data movement is a range of next generation database technologies that enable data to be amassed and analysed on a scale and speed hitherto unseen.

Global online services such as Google, Amazon and Facebook that serve billions of people around the world in real time have been made possible due to new technologies that divide tasks and files across banks of thousands of distributed computers.

Read the full version of this article as originally published in The Conversation here.