The Big Deal About Big Data And What It Means For IT And You
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Christopher Versace, Contributor
Every so often there are key words and phrases that get big play around the media, and before you know it, they are in use almost everywhere. These terms include irrational exuberance, outside the box, deliverables, skill set, metric, multitasking, bandwidth, selfie, spyware and more than a few others.
I’m sure during the last few years, you’ve heard those words and phrases time and time again… so much so that the meaning behind those words became dulled, if not lost.
There’s another term that has been gaining in popularity during the last year or so, and believe you me, it is one that will impact your very life — big data.
I know you’ve heard those two words — Big Data — before, and it’s been used by companies like Cisco Systems CSCO -1.14%, Facebook, Google GOOG +1.98%,Oracle ORCL +1.67%, IBM IBM -0.59% and others. In this age where more and more things are connected, monitored and captured, what is big data? How is it used? What does it mean for business and for the consumer? How will it change things?
These are the questions we need to understand, and joining me today on PowerTalk to sort through all of it is Arnab Gupta, Founder and CEO of Opera Solutions. As Arnab points out, it’s not just you and me that are just figuring out what big data is, companies are in the same boat — they know they need to spend on it — and they are, but how do they get value from it? How do companies use it to make better decisions, work more productively and take better actions? How does a company go from spending on big data to making it a competitive advantage for their business?
Arnab and I not only discuss all of this, but he shares how he thinks big data will force companies like Oracle, IBM, SAP and others to expand and change their capabilities, lest they risk becoming the next Eastman Kodak (KODK) or the next Blackberry (BBRY).
Arnab, what is the pain point that Opera Solutions addresses?
Organizations are now starting to understand the potential that Big Data has to drive unprecedented improvements in their business. But they are struggling with how to turn raw Big Data into real value in their organization. Companies are asking themselves, “how can we reliably and efficiently find patterns in all this data that can help us predict what customers, markets, machines, and systems will do in the future? And once we find these patterns and make the predictions, how can we integrate this into the workflow, so that people on the frontlines can make better decisions, work more productively, and take better actions?” This is the pain point that Opera Solutions addresses – reliably and efficiently extracting predictive patterns from Big Data, and turning them into suggested actions, next product recommendations, scores, alerts, etc. that help front line employees do their jobs better.
What is big data and why do businesses and how fast is it growing? Do you see that pace of growth accelerating given what Cisco CEO John Chambers calls “the Internet of Everything”?
Simply put, Big Data is the explosion of digitized data – created by people, machines, sensors, etc. – that acts as an audit trail, capturing what is happening in and amongst humans, machines, markets, natural systems, and the like. The pace of growth will continue to accelerate as:
It becomes cheaper and easier to fit machines, the natural world, and people with sensors, equipment, gadgets, and the like that capture more and more of their movements and changes;
The science of machine learning continues to advance, making it easier to extract highly accurate anomalies and predictive patterns from this flow of data;
Organizations become more adept at using the output of machine learning algorithms to power “use case models” that truly drive greater efficiencies and effectiveness in their operations.
What does this mean for companies — General Electric GE +1.56%,Starbucks SBUX -0.46%, Expedia, American Express AXP +1.07% — and how will it affect their business?
Companies that understand the potential of Big Data and are on the leading edge of extracting and using its predictive value will be huge winners. Just asWall Street investors value and reward “brand equity,” they will also begin to assess and value “data equity” – that is, what’s created when a company has access to unique data and is uniquely qualified to leverage this data.
In terms of how this will affect specific companies’ business, the impact will be ubiquitous and, in a funny way, so integrated into the “way things are” that it will be invisible. We no longer ask “how does the Internet impact businesses?” — the answer is, it impacts it on every level and therefore is just part of the status quo and the fabric of business life. This will soon be the case with Big Data, machine learning science, and the flood of predictive intelligence – it will just be part of life. The term Big Data is probably going to disappear, in fact.
To Read More: Forbes
