Big Data a BIG Opportunity

The Big Data market is exploding, not only in terms of marketing hype but also in real revenue. While its definition and overall market size may be in the realm of debate, this is for certain - Big Data is the new definitive source of competitive advantage across all industries.

Even for an industry prone to hype, the buzz surrounding Big Data is, indeed, sky-high. The vendors are reinventing their technology strategies with Big Data offerings.

"For decades, companies have been making business decisions based on transactional data stored in relational databases. Beyond that critical data, however, is a potential treasure trove of non-traditional, less/multi structured data like weblogs, social media, email, sensors, device logs and images that can be mined for useful information. This multi structured data is typically referred to as Big Data,"defines Kapil Sood, Vice President, Systems Business, Oracle India.

Industry analysts are of the view that only 5% of information created is structured and the remaining 95% is multi-structured in nature and increasing at an exponential rate that far outpaces the growth of structured data.

"Today data is being generated from different sources and is much different from what it was five years ago. Multiple sources of data are the reason why all this whole concept of Big Data has come to the fore"Today data is being generated from different sources and is much different from what it was five years ago. Multiple sources of data are the reason why all this whole concept of Big Data has come to the fore," says Ramanujam S Komanduri - Director, Business Critical Systems, HP India.

According to Surajit Sen, Director-Channels, Marketing and Alliance, NetApp India, "Big Data is about doing things differently and enabling breakthroughs by getting to information faster." He explains, "Big Data is defined as large amounts of (typically unstructured) data that requires us to re-think how we store, manage and retrieve data. The operative words clearly being BIG and DATA. How big is big? One way to think of it is that it's so big that the tools we use today cannot cope with it, in the sense, put it to any business use. So it is a relative term varying from organization to organization."

Organizations now want to do deeper and more sophisticated analysis of this data. They want to be able to do new types of statistical analysis - not over a small sample of gigabytes of data, but over terabytes, potentially even petabytes. They want to do graph analytics and start looking at the relationship between different individuals.

S Sridhar, Director - Marketing, India relationship, Dell India, says, "Big data refers to huge amounts of data, hundreds of terabytes, even petabytes-1,000 TB equal 1 PB-of information. Big data usually comes in the form of unstructured data and consists of data sets that may be unrelated to each other, such as bits from a variety of independent streams like social media, CRM, surveys, demographics, defects, and so on. These data sets are different from traditional data sets, which are often relational."

The reason why Big Data appeals to enterprises is not far to seek. Realisation is downing on the organizations embracing Big Data has the potential of creating immense possibilities for new innovation, improved agility, and increased profitability.

Leveraging Big Data

There are many ways to look at "Big Data". We at NetApp have taken the approach to segment Big Data into three major groups based on the requirements we hear from our customers," says Surajit. He adds, "Present day data centers are not capable of handling such large datasets so, NetAPp is working with the organizations to change their data centre architecture suitably to leverage its Big Data solutions." He adds, "NetApp is using Big Analytics methods to analyze data about its installed systems, comprised of many billions of records, which in the past could have taken considerably a longer time. With Big Analytics, "impossible" changes to "hours". At the moment, the India market, as in the rest of the world is at a very nascent stage. Interest however is gaining momentum and we believe the general suspects, verticals like financial services, insurance and healthcare will soon start experimenting with the concept."

Martin J. Wildberger, Vice President, WW Information Management Development, IBM, says, "We have been talking about Big data for a number of years we have been just recognised for having the leadership platform for Big Data and reason for that is that we look at Big Data in a holistic manner. Thanks to our holistic view of the breadth and depth we are the only platform that can serve taking into scalability, manageability and performance into account enabling us to expand analytics to encompass Big Data, information streams, and structured data in Data Warehouses."

Oracle plays an important role in the Big Data market with its end-to-end solutions to address the full spectrum of enterprise Big Data requirements. Kapil Sood of Oracle says, "In fact recently, in continuation with our strategy to deliver pre-integrated, pre-tested engineered systems for data management requirements, we have introduced a new engineered system - Oracle Big Data Appliance."He adds, "Oracle is the first vendor to offer customers a complete and integrated set of products to address critical Big Data requirements, unlock efficiencies, simplify management and create data insights that maximize business value."

Arun Ramachandran, Country Manager, Data Computing Division, EMC India & SAARC says, "EMC is best placed in the industry today to help customers capture, store, integrate, manage and analyze ‘Big Data’ through its expertise and acquisition of Isilon and Greenplum."

Big data analytics require a new class of skilled workers: the data scientist, or even the data artist. Some companies are now appointing chief analytics officers. Dell has been a solution provider in the field of Big Data analytics even before the expression became a buzzword. "Our company's server infrastructure is used at very large gaming companies worldwide, and Dell networking switches based on high-performance Force10 technology are standard in many large-scale Big Data installations. In addition to infrastructure, Dell has partnered with leading software vendors such as Cloudera for Hadoop technology," says S Sridhar of Dell.

Corporations large and small are being challenged by the rapid growth of data, primarily unstructured data in the form of email, video, images, scientific research, and more. It is estimated that by 2020 there will be a 42x growth in data from 2009, and within the next three years it is estimated that there will be more than 1 billion applications in existence. This is one of the drivers behind our Content Cloud, which seeks to separate data from every other part of the IT infrastructure in which it is stored and from existing applications. In the Content Cloud data will be available across applications, regardless of data type, file system or storage platform. This strategy ensures un-interrupted, real time access to information and will not only drive more efficiency and flexibility, but also enable new uses for that data and create greater business value.

Yogesh Sawant, Director, Partner Sales and Field Alliance Organization, India, Hitachi Data Systems adds, "Our Big Data vision shows customers a direct understanding that data is multidimensional, and that their solutions need to be as well. Having a converged strategy like this to combat big data provides IT leaders with a platform to get the most value out of their information."

In our rapidly evolving information economy, data is playing an increasingly critical role to driving value. Indeed, more and more organizations are recognizing that data is one of their most, if not the most, valuable assets. "Informatica is better prepared and more committed than ever to ensure you derive the greatest value possible from your data to drive the business," says Julianna DeLua, Enterprise Solution Evangelist, Informatica.

Arun Ramachandran of EMC says, "Big Data is a rare and compelling opportunity to redefine how the organization uses information in new and fascinating ways. But, like all great things, it won't be simple and it won't be easy. It'll take strong leadership and commitment to depart from business as usual, and learn how to teach organizations to extract untold value from the information that is all around us."

Big Data and Cloud

First of all, CIOs will have to realize the significance of Big Data and how to use the same for the benefit of their business. The most important driver for Big Data is cloud computing. In one sense, the move to cloud (whether private, public or hybrid) sets the stage for Big Data.

Big Data is a rare and compelling opportunity to redefine how the organization uses information in new and fascinating ways. But, like all great things, it won't be simple and it won't be easy. It'll take strong leadership and commitment to depart from business as usual, and learn how to teach organizations to extract untold value from the information that is all around us.

"We are today at a stage where such technologies are a reality. Really, the time now is about the "Cloud" meeting "Big Data". Cloud computing makes "Big Data" possible by providing an elastic pool of resources to handle the massive scale of big data. Through cloud computing, IT resources are more efficient and IT teams are more productive - freeing up resources to invest in Big Data," says Arun Ramachandran.

Big Data is driven by the nexus of three secular technology megatrends - Cloud Computing, Social Computing and Mobile Computing.

According to Martin of IBM, "Cloud computing will be critical to Big Data. Cloud computing is another paradigm to have the ability to manage hardware resources. Cloud computing allows to manage more hardware infrastructure. By definition since big data is going to deal with lots of more and more data, there is an urgent need to deal with more hardware storage processing capabilities. So it lends itself to say that cloud computing will be an excellent paradigm to deal with massive amount of information."

Indian Scenario

Healthcare where increasingly organizations (both private and public sector) are thinking about storing Big Content (electronic health records, medical images, etc.) for many decades, making them available across organizational boundaries (such as hospitals) and data centers. Additionally, the capability to use Big Analytics to gain insight into health trends and quickly analyze large data sets is gaining traction. Financial Services where the ability to quickly and completely analyze past transactions for trend detection and forecasts is core to financial success, as well as the processing and storage of documents in accordance with retention periods and processing mandates

HPC and Media & Entertainment are very data-intensive verticals with a dramatic data growth every year. In these verticals the ability to leverage Big Bandwidth to quickly ingest and process large amounts of data is critical, as is the long term retention of compute results and media content

According to Surajit, "In India, the awareness about Big Data is gaining momentum. The verticals that include Healthcare, Financial Services, HPC and media & entertainment would be the early adopters.

Big Data implementations have just begun rolling out globally with Indian firms in the consideration phase. In a globalized economy, Big Data possess strong growth potential worldwide including the Indian market which will match steps with other countries in adopting Big Data for driving business.

Kapil says, "We believe, verticals like BFSI, Retail, Media, and government sectors will adopt Big Data immediately owing to the enormous data flow, while sectors such as healthcare and telecom are likely to be among the early adopters before most verticals adopt Big Data solutions."

Martin says, "Industries people see the potential and excitement about how do we exploit the new source of data. We are working with a number of companies in different industry like banking, financial services and Telcos in India. These companies are looking at how to take advantage of the big data platform to drive competitive differentiation."

Time to Get on Bandwagon

Corporations large and small are being challenged by the rapid growth of data, primarily unstructured data in the form of email, video, images, scientific research, and more. There is no doubt that as big Data spreads across the business landscape, channel partners will make significant adjustments in response. Those who ignore it run the risk of disintermediation from a business world that has moved to new technology.

"Big data is going to be relevant for lots of governments departments, manufacturing, telcos financial services. Partners and system integrators have a major role to play in implementation of big Data," says Ramanujam of HP