Business data is growing at an average of 36% a year, according to Aberdeen's research, and organizations of all sizes, across all countries and industries, have to face the challenge of scaling up their data infrastructure to meet this new pressure. Advances in server hardware and application design have helped produce a potential solution to this issue: in-memory computing.

In a December 2011 study on the current state of big data, Aberdeen's research showed that organizations that had adopted in-memory computing were not only able to analyze larger amounts of data at faster speeds than their competitors - they were literally orders of magnitude better.