In the hands of simple salespeople and marketers, Big Data is reduced to storage – how much of those giga-, peta- things you’re going to need as data expands exponentially. In fact, Big Data has little to do with storage. The problem is that to get explanations on Big Data you need to engage with technical types and then the confusion begins as everyone Hadoop’s and whoops about Open Source frameworks until your eyes glaze over.
My simple view on the matter is this. Most companies do a decent job of storing their core, structured data and are getting better at mining it. I would argue that not enough mid market companies have a decent disaster recovery strategy which is a real back, storage and retrieval plan but that’s more to with market education. Big Data is really all about the unstructured data that we are accumulating. Emails, messaging, notes within CRM databases, unstructured file systems make up Big Data and it’s the fastest growing area of data. I mean, how many of us struggle to find all the emails relating to a specific subject? Only recently has Outlook even attempted to solve the problem but it’s still nowhere near to solving the problem when you look at thousands of emails in archives. How many people struggle to find a certain spreadsheet or latest version of a presentation in the filing system they created which they thought made sense at the time? How many people want to search their CRM systems or recorded conversations beyond keywords?
Analysing and extracting value from unstructured data is the key to Big Data. Storage is but one aspect of it all but the real guts of the subject is all about software tools. In recent weeks, companies like Cloudera and Hortonworks who are part of a new generation of data analytic software for Big Data have announced inward investment and expansion. Big Data’s fuzziness as a concept is coming into focus.
For us as distributors, we have to start shaping our business and placing our bets. Azlan is very much aligned to IBM’s software portfolio on data analytics at the moment. This is likely to be a practice that is extended particularly as ourselves and SDG exploit our joint capabilities in the coming months. For Azlan and SDG, 2013 will be a defining year in terms of Big Data.
I hope you will come along with us for the ride as whenever we can add real value in a market still dominated by hardware by introducing high capability software and tools, there is profit to be made.
Thanks again to all Azlan’s customers for their partnership and business in 2012, have a great Christmas and good luck in 2013 – the year of Big Data..
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