The “Bigness” of Big Data.
If everybody is talking about Big Data it must be something very cool, don’t you think? Every day the term is mentioned in newspapers, websites, schools, business meetings, conferences… Currently, Big Data is all over, and that is exactly why we are writing about it.
EMC^2’s video which we featured last week helped us a lot in understanding what Big Data is all about, now let us present our interpretation of this in-vogue tech concept.
Massive amounts of data which cannot be handled with conventional tools are Big Data (BD). Imagine analysing all tweets posted in one country in a day, using conventional data base tools, tricky, right? There is so much information available in our world that it is becoming very problematic to use it. Big data applications allow people or companies to solve problems, converting unprocessed data to useful information.
Two of the big players in this market, IBM and EMC^2 identify three main dimensions of Big Data:
· Size: Big data is certainly big. Data is available in enormous quantities.
· Speed: Data is generated extremely fast. To be competitive, users need to process and to analyse the data very fast.
· Variety: Data come in many forms and from many different sources. (Dates, Names, Bank Accounts, Bar Codes, Videos, emails, Tweets, Web Sites, etc.)
Big Data is useful in a wide range of contexts, some of our favourite applications: Electronic Payment for private or public companies. Agile analytics in the Stock Market. Business Intelligence for new ventures. Security: predicting or detecting fraud, And Data Warehouse in Social Networks.
Big Data is a tool which creates competitive advantages in business. Getting updated information from many more sources, and processing data faster will enable companies to understand their markets better, to anticipate crisis, and to make intelligent decisions. Those extracting value of the existing and growing data will be ahead of the competition. That is for us, the “bigness”, of Big Data.
As always, more on this topic in the coming days…
The image used in this post is a piece named Electress by Nick Gentry. He is British artist who recycles tech products like floppy disks to create his paintings. http://www.nickgentry.com/index.html