More than 75 percent of midsize to large businesses are implementing big-data-related solutions within the next 12 months — with customer care, marketing and sales departments increasingly driving demand, according to new Microsoft Corp. research released today.

According to Microsoft's "Global Enterprise Big Data Trends: 2013" study of more than 280 IT decision-makers, the following trends emerged:

• Although the IT department (52 percent) is currently driving most of the demand for big data, customer care (41 percent), sales (26 percent), finance (23 percent) and marketing (23 percent) departments are increasingly driving demand.
• Seventeen percent of customers surveyed are in the early stages of researching big data solutions, whereas 13 percent have fully deployed them; nearly 90 percent of customers surveyed have a dedicated budget for addressing big data.
• Nearly half of customers (49 percent) reported that growth in the volume of data is the greatest challenge driving big data solution adoption, followed by having to integrate disparate business intelligence tools (41 percent) and having tools able to glean the insight (40 percent).

The company published its findings to the Microsoft News Center this morning, kicking off a week of announcements focused on the company's big data customers, products and future investments.

Microsoft "Big Data Week"

"Big data can be large tables of structured data, huge files of complex unstructured data, or small amounts of machine-generated data that pile up faster than you can make sense of it," said Eron Kelly , general manager of SQL Server at Microsoft.

Big data is changing the way organizations and people do business, discover insights and interact with one another. This week Microsoft will showcase what customers, partners, the industry and Microsoft are doing to make this happen:

• Today: "Global Enterprise Big Data Trends: 2013" and insight from big data executives and analysts
• Tuesday, Feb. 12: Spotlight on big data early adopters, including a Q&A with The Weather Channel Chief Information Officer Bryson Koehler on how big data is transforming his company
• Wednesday, Feb. 13: Microsoft's big data approach, investments and products
• Thursday, Feb. 14: Silicon Valley big data event highlights
• Friday, Feb. 15: The future of big data and machine learning within Microsoft Research, including a Q&A with MSR Researcher Eric Horvitz