Sayinath AG
For those following the Big Data story closely, the number 1.8 ZB should ring a bell?that is the amount of data estimated to have been created in 2011 alone! IDC, the leading global provider of market intelligence and advisory services, predicts that overall data will grow by 50 times by 2020!
What does Big Data mean for businesses after all? That?s the debate that occupies some if not all boardroom discussions. CEOs/CIOs are still sceptical about making the plunge into the Big Data ocean, largely because they lack clarity on what Big Data means for their kind of businesses. Gartner believes that the effects of Big Data are pervasive and Big Data will evolve to become a standardised requirement in leading information architectural practices, forcing older practices and technology into early obsolescence.
The potential to derive value from Big Data is immense. However, businesses will need to have the right strategy in place to win the Big Data game. What is the Right Big Data strategy?
Organisations will have to look at two aspects to derive value out of Big Data:
(i) Making sense of the 3Vs: Volume, Velocity and Variety of Big Data
Decoding volume: The volume of data being generated across businesses today is humongous, more so for the retail and travel industries. Retailers around the world are using the radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology today to tag their products. Big retailers, who run up to a million transactions a day, generate that much data from RFID tags. This data from RFID tags can become a huge source of information, if harvested in the right manner and can help companies in inventory management.
Similarly, for the travel industry, consumer-generated data is huge. For most airlines for instance, ?millenials? (born between 1982 and 2000) constitute a major chunk of their customer base. This new breed of customers is synonymous with smart phones, social media, internet and instant messaging. This new savvy customer works solely on social networking, blogs and web-based searches. Smart companies must track sentiments on social media in order to enhance customer satisfaction and remain a company of choice for the customer.
The emergence of cloud computing and distributed storage techniques can help companies address the volume and storage challenge. These include the conversion from tape to disk, de-duplication, flash storage and the rapid adoption of 100 Gigabit Ethernet, replacing the fibre channel. All of this allows for more storage capacity and new challenges of retrieval of data and quick computing, without necessarily storing everything.
Decoding variety: Millions of pages, emails and unstructured data, such as Word documents and PDFs, nearly infinite number of events and information from every type of enterprise data center, data from customer transactions, phone calls, credit card usage, machine maintenance and operational updates?this varied gamut of data makes up Big Data. All these sources of data need to be identified, analysed and acted upon to create value out of them.
Developers are creating softwares and languages that can manage a large variety of data files. This empowers enterprises to pick and choose data sources that matter to their business.
Decoding velocity: Data is generated at the pace of lightning. It takes just one click for a customer to ?Like? a brand on social media. As fast as it is generated, data also needs to be analysed and acted upon in time. No matter how big the volume or how varied the nature of data is, every set of data has a best-before date and relevance. The key to driving value from Big Data is to be able to make sense of it in time.
Tools are available today for faster data capture and analysis. These tools allow data capture as quickly as the data is generated. One example would be: real-world models of events.
(ii) Choosing the right partner who understands the organisation?s business
Decoding the 3Vs of Big Data accurately is possible only if enterprises have the right partner who understands the organisation?s business, can draw up the right strategy and knows which data sources to look at, how much data to analyse and most importantly which software and tools to deploy and at what cost.
Only if enterprises do all of this will they be able to enhance ROI and reap the benefits of Big Data, which are:
* Access to transparent information which is usable at a higher frequency
* Access to accurate and detailed information on product inventories, social media sentiments, customer transactions and so on
* Easy segmentation of customers for precise customization of products and services
* Improved and fact-based decision making
The writer is associate VP, business intelligence & analytics services, Sonata Software
