Most important is the agility of big data foundational solutions, so that business units can rapidly spin up explorations/proof-ofconcepts. Scalability is also critical, to meet the coming surge in demand as more big data projects come online - and all those proof-of-concepts begin to move into production. A big opportunity - for line-of-business leaders and IT - is to break new ground by moving to Internet-scale practises that have been used to capitalize on big data by social media and web companies such as Facebook and Netflix, which place data at the centre of their business.