There’s a myth surrounding Big Data that says size matters.
And it does, but it’s not the lone defining criteria for Big Data applications. The growing volume of data in the world necessitates Big Data to an extent, but it’s the variety of data behind the growth, and not simply the vastness of it, that is the real driver. If Big Data were only concerned with analyzing more data, it would merely be Business Intelligence (BI) on a bigger scale.
Big Data is really about gathering and analyzing the massive amounts of data that traditional BI solutions can’t: looking for trends in tweets and Facebook posts, making real-time operational decisions using machine sensor data, etc. The “big” in Big Data isn’t only about volume or velocity or even variety; it’s about using more types of data to transform your business in a big way.
Big Data is a potentially disruptive technology that can help businesses achieve quantum leaps of insight and efficiency. It can also be a distracting technology, however, if businesses try to implement Big Data into their business without first making the business case for it. Big Data projects need to be tied to tangible business goals and a plan for what your business can expect by analyzing these new kinds of data (e.g., higher customer loyalty, reduced customer care costs, operational savings, etc.). Without a clear sense of ROI at the outset, even adoption of big data frameworks like Hadoop run the risk of becoming one more white elephant.
Once businesses make the case for Big Data, they need to implement it—which can be as big a project as the name “big data” implies. There are currently three implementation strategies available to enterprises:
- You can build it yourself… provided you have the expertise and can retain that talent over time in the face of heavy recruiting from competitors;
- You can outsource it… so long as your business is comfortable putting its competitive advantage in the hands of a third party;
- Or you can buy a pre-integrated Big Data solution from a trusted, experienced partner.
In our experience, Big Data implementations are more successful when enterprises choose the latter strategy. There are several pre-integrated Big Data solutions on the market today from leading vendors that deliver the reliability, flexibility and simplicity that enterprises need to quickly capitalize on the real-time analysis of semi-structured data. HP Vertica is one such platform, providing a pre-integrated Big Data solution that allows enterprises to launch Big Data applications quickly, take advantage of integrating with leading-edge framework like Hadoop and existing data warehouse systems, for greater operational and customer insights.
At Rolta AdvizeX, we work closely with HP to ensure that our customers get the advice and expertise they need to guide their Big Data project safely through the planning, design, installation and customization stages. If you’d like to see how Big Data can make a big difference in your business, ask about our Advizer tools to gauge your Big Data readiness and calculate the potential rewards. ▪