Are We Ready for Big Data?

Ayes
Nays
Ajay Kumar Meher

“It is a solution by itself. It has the ability to drive innovation in an organization and obtain better business products.”


Ajay Kumar Meher

Multi Screen Media, Vice President-IT & New Media

Raghu Kumar Paruchuri

“We are two years away from when both enterprises and vendors are ready to use big data solutions.”


Raghu Kumar Paruchuri

Tata Power Strategic Electronic Division, Head ERP & IT

 

I think big data is a concept or technology which allows a CIO or an organization to bring in a variety of structured and unstructured data to the table and use it for a meaningful purpose. It is a solution by itself. It has the ability to drive innovation in an organization and obtain better business products. Looking back, you will observe that a number of organizations have not experienced growth at the same rate that the petabytes of data have populated their data warehouses. So it becomes necessary for these organizations to make decisions based on the variability of different kinds of data.
Older business intelligence tools created analytics, but didn’t work to determine if the right measures of an organization’s activities and performance were being used. Now with the inception of big data, methods are available in order to compare metrics and validate them.
Although several business intelligence tools are available, the real benefits of the acquired customer data are only being availed partially. In the past, large media and broadcasting companies stored their data in analog form. Even in our organization, we have implemented a platform to capture all this information. It has resulted in a new challenge and the concept of big data is trying to resolve it. 
Today, CIOs are concerned about how to use available data before their competitors figure out a method to utilize the same information. Bigger enterprises are converting their entire data libraries into a metadata format. This metadata will not only enable backend management, but help manage abundant data streams and help CIOs with better decision-making. The capabilities of big data solutions are plenty depending on business process requirements. With the advent of big data, technology is slowly maturing in order to manage the 3 Vs: The value, velocity and variability of data. And big data also offers me the ability to re-purpose content.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I think big data is a concept or technology which allows a CIO or an organization to bring in a variety of structured and unstructured data to the table and use it for a meaningful purpose. It is a solution by itself. It has the ability to drive innovation in an organization and obtain better business products. Looking back, you will observe that a number of organizations have not experienced growth at the same rate that the petabytes of data have populated their data warehouses. So it becomes necessary for these organizations to make decisions based on the variability of different kinds of data.

 

Older business intelligence tools created analytics, but didn’t work to determine if the right measures of an organization’s activities and performance were being used. Now with the inception of big data, methods are available in order to compare metrics and validate them.
Although several business intelligence tools are available, the real benefits of the acquired customer data are only being availed partially. In the past, large media and broadcasting companies stored their data in analog form. Even in our organization, we have implemented a platform to capture all this information. It has resulted in a new challenge and the concept of big data is trying to resolve it. 
Today, CIOs are concerned about how to use available data before their competitors figure out a method to utilize the same information. Bigger enterprises are converting their entire data libraries into a metadata format. This metadata will not only enable backend management, but help manage abundant data streams and help CIOs with better decision-making. The capabilities of big data solutions are plenty depending on business process requirements. With the advent of big data, technology is slowly maturing in order to manage the 3 Vs: The value, velocity and variability of data. And big data also offers me the ability to re-purpose content.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I believe that we, both enterprises and vendors, are not ready for big data solution tool sets. The fact is vendor offerings are not yet mature. Today, we are where we were with server virtualization back in 2007-2008. How do I know that the market is not ready? There are a couple of ways you can tell. First, how many people are really comfortable or even know about technologies like Hadoop? Another telling point is how many large, mature vendor companies have solution sets that are out of the beta stage? Sure there have been some releases recently from big names like IBM, but are these mature offerings?

The way I see it, it will take time for the big data solution market to mature. First, we will see large and niche players make their offerings and then we’ll see a gradual consolidation of players. 

On the enterprise side, executives are not yet ready, in my opinion, to be able to use the power of big data. If you look at forecast surveys for 2012, for instance, you’ll see that business intelligence is at the top of the list of most Indian CIOs. If we haven’t got to the point where we are meeting business needs with traditional analytical tools like business intelligence then, what about big data solution sets that go beyond BI?

Here’s another reason why enterprises are not yet ready: We lack the internal expertise. Today, if I were to implement a big data solution set, I would have to depend almost entirely on my vendor—given that in-house experts would almost be impossible to find. And that situation will ensure that support fees are prohibitive. 

In my opinion, we are at least two years away from the point when both enterprises and vendors are ready to use big data solution sets. 

 

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