Oracle has unveiled its strategy to help customers meet the challenges posed by Big Data and announced the availability of its Big Data Appliance in India. Oracle's Big Data approach is focussed on engineered systems and is aimed at making big data initiatives practical for the enterprise.

"Oracle is the first vendor to offer a complete and integrated solution to address the full spectrum of enterprise Big Data requirements,"said Sundar Ram, Vice-President, Technology Sales Consulting, Asia Pacific, Oracle Corporation. "Oracle's Big Data strategy is centred on the idea that customers can evolve their current enterprise data architecture to incorporate Big Data and deliver business value, leveraging the proven reliability, flexibility and performance of their Oracle systems," he added.

As per a leading industry analyst firm, in 11 years between 2009 and 2020, the size of the "Digital Universe" will increase 44 fold. That is a 41% increase in capacity every year. In addition, only 5% of this data being created is structured and the remaining 95% is semi- structured in nature.

But the problem is not the creation of the data, but how organizations can locate the relevant information to do deeper and more sophisticated analysis of this data and use it in real time.

To make the most of big data, organizations are now looking at evolving their IT infrastructures to handle the rapid rate of delivery of extreme volumes of data, with varying data types, which can then be integrated with an organization's other enterprise data to be analyzed. In fact, the most recent annual survey on data warehousing by the Independent Oracle Users Group (IOUG) found that approximately 48% of enterprises expect a significant or moderate increase in the unstructured data analysis over the next five years.