Big Data – the hype

Undoubtedly, BIG DATA is the mostly hyped term in today’s IT industry. Many vendors and service providers try to group their offerings around the BIG DATA to join the trend, thus increasing the hype significantly. This has inflated the term; “BIG DATA” became an umbrella word meaning a set of enabling technologies, typical use cases, and new types of information, data sources and roles at the same time. Let’s make things clear, and see the real value behind the exaggerated expectations.

Data driven culture

Although Big Data by its nature seems to be a rather technical issue, its primary and eventual goal is to improve the business and provide better service to customers. Since the underlying infrastructure is new, this assumes a long learning process, that leads us to the s.c. “data driven culture”, where good, unbiased analysis becomes an everyday norm and this creates tremendous opportunities, from better customer service to risk management, from developing new products to creating new revenue streams. The term “data driven culture” implies that the scope is much wider than just technology. Big Data requires investment into people and processes as well.

Big Data as part of enterprise information infrastructure

In spite of its popularity nowadays, only a few proved Big Data use cases are seen, and even those are rather “point-solution”, for one particular problem, having very narrow functionality. In our view when thinking of Big Data enterprises in fact need a long term component of their information infrastructure. This approach differs from “point-solutions” significantly, and although there are lot of talks about Big Data, the words on experience about the “infrastructure-type” Big Data are quite rare.