Big Data, Big Deal?

If we look back in recent years, the dominating words that represent technical trends are around “Cloud Computing” and  “Big Data” in the IT world. More and more firms have planned strategically for big data as it is beyond a pure technical term and is gaining business impact. Per research published by Gartner, big data ranked #2 in technology trends for the near future. This is based on the prediction that semi-structured or unstructured data will grow some 80% over the course of the next five years, creating a huge IT challenge. Big data “stories” and challenges occur every day:

: 30 billion pieces of content including constant stream of comments, links and photo postings were added to website this past month by 600 million plus users.

: More than 2 billion videos are watched on YouTube … each day.

: 32 billion searches were performed last month … on Twitter.

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 : analyzes billions of search results to tailor high-value advertising programs.

Even at non-tech firms, such as American Express and Visa, companies have invested billions creating data banks capable of managing immense volumes.

Another example in China is Taobao.com, which sells to consumers. It has 300m customers and shifted $29 billion-worth of goods in 2009. It grows approximately 30% each year.

So what is big data by definition? Actually it’s well known that there are three Vs of big data: Volume, variety, and velocity.

Out of these 3 attributes, volume is the primary focus. In each attribute there are extended measures in the following figure:

Big data patterns and analytics will create large opportunities for organizations and have the potential to drive significant ROI. I can think of several points to support the viewpoint of big data being a big deal:

• There are many hot buzzwords nowadays such as cloud computing, social networking, and mobility technology, and more. But the major trend sure to be on the top of every CIOs’ mind this year remains predominantly “Big Data.” It is direct challenge that any enterprise organization may be facing: data volume has been increasing dramatically. A recent IDC study said that the total volume of electronically stored data and files—the digital universe—will reach 1.2 zettabytes in 2015. That’s 21 zeros behind the 1, if you’re keeping count.
• With the evolution and revolution of internet and web technology, the organization is interacting with more heterogeneous sources comprised of twitter, social media, video, mobile device messages etc.  How can we manage and process those unstructured bits of information to gain valuable knowledge for decision makers? Big data strategy.
• Numeric business intelligence and information management vendors such as Teradata, Informatica, SAP & Oracle etc have recognized the importance of cloud computing and big data. They started up a product appliance of NoSQL database. In-memory analytics and acquired cloud computing or big data based firms strengthen their leadership in the market.

This is my first post discussing big data’s popularity, importance and trends. Stay tuned to this blog for future posts on big data.