the big promise of big data

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The BIG Promise of Big Data. Published: January 17, 2013 - Fru Louis

ABOUT BIG DATA: A NEW PARADIGM

As an IT Professional who cares deeply about the future of

technological trends, I spend a great deal amount of time reading

up when I hear of any new

technology with great

potentials. Big Data is obviously

the latest technological trend

that has sprung from the

confines of academia and

technology circles into the

mainstream, and certainly

deserves great attention from

CIOs, CTOs, CEOs and IT Leaders across organizations.

This age of technology we are experiencing with the all-

encompassing power of social media is arguably one of the greatest

revolutions in the evolution of technological innovations. Data is

being generated, stored and analyzed like never before and the

statistics do not lie.

90% of the data in the world today has been created in the last two

years alone and every day, we continue to create over 2.5

quintillion bytes of data — the size is simply mind blowing and

almost impossible to phantom.

With the advent of smart mobile devices and sensors, information

has become ubiquitous— allowing companies to store data about

people, traffic, disease, conversation, power usage, shopping

behavior, climate information, posts to social media sites, digital

pictures, videos, purchase transaction records, cell phone GPS

signals and nearly everything else.

To put this into perspective, think about the classic point-of-sale

systems (POS) a couple of years ago. They capture details of the

transactions, what people buy, what time of day, how much they

bought and whether the product was on sale. But those systems

don’t tell you

what the

customer

didn’t do. What

they looked at

and not buy?

What they did

not look at?

How they

walked around

the store? What motivated their purchase? E.t.c. But today, all this

data about customers can and is being captured, stored and

analyzed by companies - thus opening up great opportunities to

increase the bottom-line. This is the new paradigm we are dealing

with and it’s what big data is about.



DATA STILL IS KING: WHERE FANTASY, BIG BUSINESS AND BIG

DATA ALL INTERSECT

Contrary to popular believe, Big Data is not a technology – but

technology is the basis for processing the large and increasing

volumes of data that organizations are now collecting. At the

fundamental level, Big Data is an ecosystem consisting of two major

phases – (1)

the phase of

gathering

large

unstructured

volumes of

data (2) the

phase of

analyzing the

collected data

to derive

intelligence.

Today, the

phase of gathering data has greatly been made easy due to the

presence of highly accurate sensors and the virtually unlimited

storage capacity of hard drives. So, the greatest challenge with Big

Data lies not with gathering data, but analyzing the vast amounts

of data that has been gathered and stays trapped in various

business applications and data silos across an organization.

But now, thanks to some clever “magic” being produced by highly

analytic disciplines such as mathematics, programming and

scientific instinct – new algorithms and computational models are

being developed to analyze large volumes of data while minimizing

the hardware requirements.

As opposed to single standalone databases, the new Big Data

systems employ many distributed machines working in parallel to

store, analyze and process large data sets across clustered

networks.



The Hadoop framework and other such projects blazing the trails in

this frontier are rolling out solutions such as NoSQL, HDFS, Pentaho,

HyperTable, Datameer, Sector, Hbase, Sphere, MongoDB, Hive,

Nutch, Pig, Zookeeper, Cassandra, Chukwa, Mahout, Cascading,

Oozie, Azkaban, Voldemort, Norbert, Krati, Kamikaze, Kafka, Helix,

Decomposer, DataFu, Bobo, Storm, GraphLab, Spark, Disco,

BashReduce, Map/Reduce, and R just to name a few which promise

to bring Big Data to the main stream.

Even big names companies like Microsoft with the Microsoft

HDInsight and Windows Azure HDInsight Service are positioning

themselves not to be left out of the frenzy.

BIG DATA BOTTOM-LINE: WHAT MATTERS TO COMPANIES

When all is said and done, the big names used to describe big data

concepts really don’t matter. In most organizations, technology is

simply a means to an end, and not the other way around.

Big data (or whatever the term means to you) is no different. It

should be adopted only if it adds value to your organization and not

because you want to look cool.

Business users and customers who are the ultimate consumers of

big data solutions care about value added, and usually don't care

how you get around to achieving it. They have problems, and they

want solutions to those problems. They usually have specific list of

things that they care about such as simplicity, functionality,

practicality and usability.

Whether you choose to call the solution to this problems "big data"

or "cloud computing" or "in memory computing" or "quantum

computing" – doesn't matter much to the end users and more

importantly to the bottom line.

BIG DATA VISION: IS BIG DATA THE PANACEA OR NOT?

As we all stand in anticipation waiting for Big Data to usher in the

big solutions, it is important to remember that Big Data is no

panacea and does not eliminate the current need for sound data



warehouse practices. And while big data could benefit greatly from

an enterprising spirit of having a tool and then finding a need for it,

it may better serve adopters if they have a need and then find the

tool for it.

Big data aside, if you pick any “old school” technology and work

hard or long enough, you would accomplish your goals and be able

to find patterns and clues in your data - but then what?

To make big data successful, it is important to first, decide what

problem you want to solve. If you pick a real business problem,

such as how you can change your advertising strategy to increase

customer retention, or how to increase sales to a certain customer

demographics, or how to reduce cost on shipping products to

customers or how to better understand customers clicking habits

on your website, then Big data can provide tangible solutions with

ROI that can be measured quantitatively.

KEY TAKE WAY POINTS

At the end of

the day, users

and customers

care about

results i.e. the

things they

can touch and

feel – not names or techniques. They don't care if you have used a

technique that will impress a triple Nobel laureate or a technique

paraphrased in plain language as "me kill mammoth, me make

fire". They simply care about the results -- and if Big Data solutions

helps you realize these results for your customers and users, then

go for it. If not, be sure to pause and reconsider.

RECOMMENDED READ

Big data: The next frontier for innovation, competition, and productivity o http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/mgi/research/technolo

gy_and_innovation/big_data_the_next _frontier_for_innovation

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About NextGen

NextGen Global Solutions, LLC. (NGG: IT) is an information technology consulting, research and advisory company. We deliver the technology-related

insight necessary for our clients to make the right decisions, every day. From CIOs and senior IT leaders, to business leaders, Engineering and Service

professionals. Information is power in this digital age, and we try to research and provide the resources and solutions that would help decision makers

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