Monday, November 26, 2012

What is the Big Deal about Big Data


Like every sector in our computer world we always have some new trends.  In fact the dynamics of changing trend in Computer industry is very evident. Few years back all want to adopt tablet and different form of post pc devices. And recent time Cloud was the big word. All most all companies have launched lots of cloud specific services or platform. Every blogger including me has written about cloud. And now the recent buzz is Big Data, Hadoop, Data Analytics etc.. 
There is a say Pen is mightier than Sword.  It means Knowledge, information is the key. If a student knows the right answer of the question in exam he will succeed. If the doctor knows more information about the disease he can diagnose and treat better. Similarly if a business knows has right information about its customer needs it can succeed well. So it’s important to get right information in time. And if we think most of the time that “information” is the only difference between success and failure.
So people invest huge to store data and retrieve/derive the useful information out of it in real time.  The whole process is divided in two steps first part is to store related data. And most of the time these are unstructured data. And the second thing is to analysis or processes those data to get right information in real-time. These unstructured data can come from or around your business.  For example any ecommerce portal will like to store and analysis its visitor browsing pattern. This will help them to arrange or present their products efficiently. Similarly an bank should like to know what its customers like, dislike or spending habit. So that it can customize its product as per it. More or less all big corporate houses are started spending in BigData and Analytics.
Well Data and Analytics not only help big organization. It can be useful  to stream line personal finance too. Money manager from Intuit is an example in this direction. It tracks all spending, and categorize them. So that one can easily track income and spending.  Its early days, In coming days we will see more product or services around Analytics and BIgData.