Although some analysts have opinioned that Big Data was “overhyped” last year, a new industry study reveals otherwise.

In its research, Ovum (News - Alert) ranked Twitter mentions, sentiment of vendors and open source organizations associated with the Big Data market in 2012. The study revealed that attitudes around Big Data vendors is positive, and the tech buzzword has even managed to transcend from the enterprise IT world to a popular subject among the business world.

In a new research note, Ovum data gathered by DataSift found that while Hadoop garners much of the spotlight as a Big Data platform, the vendor 10gen, which develops MongoDB, came in second in mentions to Apache, which hosts the Hadoop project. This finding was quite surprising, according to Tony Baer, principal analyst for Ovum

“Given the level of build-up and suggested hype, it surprised us that sentiment expressed about Big Data vendors still remained so positive in 2012,” Baer elaborated in a statement. “What’s also interesting is the degree to which Big Data became a business, not just a technology story in 2012.”

Some business publications, including Forbes and Harvard Business Review, edged out popular IT news portals in terms of coverage of this traditionally “techy” subject, Baer added.

Overall positive mentions of Big Data vendors outnumbered negative mentions by 3:1; however, negative sentiment spiked in November with headlines over HP’s troubled acquisition of Autonomy (News - Alert).

“Not surprisingly, given that vendors accelerated the pace of product announcements during 2012, 60 percent of Twitter activity occurred in the second half of the year,” Ovum said.

The Twitter (News - Alert) data also provided a reasonable glimpse into vendor-brand recognition with Big Data. 10gen, which develops the popular MongoDB document-oriented NoSQL database, scored high in mentions, trailing only behind the Apache Foundation. In addition, IBM (News - Alert) and Teradata were also regarded highly in the Twitter stream, coming after Apache and 10gen in positive mentions. Splunk, associated with machine data, is also popular among developers.

“While Twitter streams are not a scientific focus group for detecting brand awareness, they provide a valuable window on market thinking,” Baer added. “The data showed that while some players, such as IBM and Teradata (News - Alert), successfully scored high recognition in Twitter mentions, other enterprise players need to better focus their message to get Big Data recognition.”