Each minute, there are 1,500 blogs, 98,000 tweets, and 168 million emails sent. In fact, with all this data, Forrester predicts over the next few years we will outperform Moore’s Law. In this year alone we will hit of a volume of 2.7 zettabytes of global digital data.
Don’t be intimidated though, all this data presents a huge opportunity to businesses. The more information you have, the more there is to analyze, and the more insights you are able to derive.
Big data, defined by Forrester, is “techniques and technologies that make capturing value from data at an extreme scale economical.” The information comes from everywhere, and mostly outside your company such as social media, demographics, the web, and various different feeds. All this accumulated information can bring about value, opportunity, and eventually profit – if you handle it correctly.
When deciding how to manage your big data, there is no one size fits all, it’s a case by case scenario; requiring several technologies to filter, format, and prepare for analysis. And only a small set of it all can really bring the value you’re looking for.
Business Intelligence helps you turn the water to wine, giving not only managers, but employees timely, accurate information to make decisions. But where do you store the valuable and the rest? Holger Kisker, Forbes.com contributor suggests sending it straight to the cloud rather than in-house.
3 Reasons Why
- Big data requires advanced technologies, skills, and investments. Do you want or need this all in-house?
- It includes a significant amount of external data. Why waste the time to manage the data behind your firewall?
- Big data is high maintenance, requiring a lot of data services. Focus on the value your differentiated data can bring.
Cloud technology is continuously being optimized, boasting a variety of business values. In fact, 38% of companies surveyed in Forrester’s Software Survey, “The Changing Cloud Agenda”, are planning a BI SaaS project before the end of 2013 – showing signs for a stronger adoption of BI cloud solutions.
Before, when it came to Software-as-a-Service applications, Business Intelligence was often the last in the league, but with big data BI may have found its star pitcher.
For a visual on how you can benefit from a BI strategy, check out this cool infographic.
Nice piece with an important message. Big data can be a big burden. What businesses need to consider is the value proposition that cloud-based services offer: how much time is saved by outsourcing data acquisition and analysis, and how to leverage the existing expertise of the in-house users.
Lindsey, good article. One solution worth mentioning is HPCC Systems from LexisNexis which provides for an efficient low cost one-stop solution for BI and analytics needs. This open source enterprise-ready solution is comprised of a single platform that is easy to install, manage and code. Their built-in analytics libraries for Machine Learning and integration with other open source tools like Pentaho provide companies with an end to end solution for ETL,data mining and reporting. For more info visit: hpccsystems.com
In so many ways, Big Data fuels business intelligence but only when the data is collected, stored and utilized in smart ways. Think about the data you have access to, from user profile data, legacy data, clickstream data, site behavioral data, purchasing data, etc. — the list goes on. By it’s very nature, this data is complex and dynamic. Too many organizations keep data in disparate silos of databases.
Key to success with Big Data is unifying that data in a way that helps organizations make business decisions, and then leveraging that knowledge to improve marketing programs.
BI is about the analyzing all the big data, and you’re right on in its connections with data. Intelligence is what makes data work for you, but even more importantly…the critical first step, is clearly outlining a vision of what insight you want to gain. Having data crunched and spit back out into a bunch of figures is helpful, but only if you can use that information to drive decisions. Gary Z, Neustar | http://bit.ly/Qy62pL