Big Data Cloud Trends — Data as a Core Asset : Part 1 of 3

Today, the core of any successful company is the data it manages and its ability to effectively model, analyze and process that data quickly — almost in real time — so that it can make the right decision faster and rise to the top.

In fact, data as a core business asset has risen to the same level of importance to a business as its people and its capital. Today, because of the time and energy businesses give to understanding the behavioral implications of their data, scenarios like the following are an everyday occurrence:

• An e-Commerce company collects and analyzes user behavior through clickstream logs in order to understand purchase patterns. The analysis drives future product presentation models and web site features.
• A social network analyzes the information it collects about its users. By carefully analyzing their stated likes, dislikes, social and demographic data, it can provide personalized ads to each user.
• A large retail chain analyzes historical inventory data to stock up goods at the right place and right time.
• A Pharmaceutical company correlates subsequent product purchasing patterns from adverse drug reactions.

Twenty years ago, none of the previous scenarios were possible for any but the largest of businesses that could afford to invest time, resources and capital.

Nowadays, decisions are based on the data and not on political or personal preferences. Hence, capturing data and distilling knowledge from that data has become even more important. And if businesses can collect, shape, and analyze data faster than others, it becomes their competitive advantage as they can make decisions faster. Since the size of data is ever-increasing and businesses compete on their ability to analyze the data, the importance of collecting, storing, analyzing and visualizing massive amounts of data has increased dramatically.

Imagine what your business could achieve if it could provide personalized and customized experiences of every product(s) to every single customer based on their preferences, moods and market conditions!

Enter Big Data

Big Data is all about storing, processing, analyzing, sharing, distributing and visualizing massive amounts of data so that companies can distill knowledge from it, derive valuable business insights from that knowledge, and make better business decisions, all as quickly as possible.

Every company is sitting on a big pile of data. With every click, swipe, pinch, tap, like, tweet, check-in, share, API call, phone call, they are generating data. Moreover, with the increasing number of consumers and devices that act as “sensors”, the growth of data is not going to slow down any time soon. If there was a way to analyze, decode and derive patterns and trends from this “Big Data”, it could be significant competitive advantage that could prove extremely useful to the company.

Big Data is not just about data itself but it is ability and capability to derive business insights from this data.

In the next part, I will discuss what has changed and why there is so much buzz around Big Data these days…