Courtesy of Business Line
IT companies are dealing with large volumes of data growing
exponentially every year and how to manage these data is a big
challenge.
Every day, 2.5 quintillion ('1' followed by 18
zeroes) bytes of data are created - from Facebook, digital pictures
and videos and online transaction records.
By 2015, the market for this 'big data' technology
and services globally will reach $16.9 billion up from $3.2 billion
in 2010, says research firm IDC. According to a Wikibon, the market
for 'big data' is expected to grow annually at 58 per cent to touch
over $50 billion by 2017.
According to Mr Willie Hardie, Vice-President -
Database Product Marketing, Oracle Corporation, 'big data' is going
to be the next wave in the IT industry. His area of expertise
includes Oracle Database and Oracle Exadata and Oracle Real
Application Clusters.
In a recent chat with Business Line, Mr Hardie
dealt on length on what is this 'big data' all about. Excerpts from
the interview:
Everybody in the IT industry is today talking about
'big data.' What is this all about?
Big data is the next wave in the IT industry. Big
data sizes are a constantly moving target currently ranging from a
few dozen terabytes to many 'petabyte' of data.
Companies like Oracle see a huge opportunity to
manipulate and understand customers' data. Lot of our customers in
sectors like retail and banking are looking at big data project.
Organise, analyse and integrate it in the business
applications.
What sort of data?
There are a variety of data. Typically, to date,
most database applications deal predominately with structure data,
which neatly fits in a structured rows and columns.
With big data, it is a complex, variety of data,
which is unstructured.
For example, social media sites like Facebook or
Twitter are throwing up millions of data sent out by people at a
rapid rate.
So how should clients tackle such data flow?
The biggest challenge companies have is to first
understand big data. We have this massive low identify information,
which previously was never included in the day-to-day transaction
business applications. To get value out of the big data, companies
need to analyse the data and integrate that in to the business
intelligence applications and intelligence dashboards that we are
not looking at - information historically like what happened a
month ago, what happened last year and looking all these
information collectively to see how we can have an impact on our
business.
What are IT companies dealing with?
They are dealing with large volumes of data that is
growing exponentially every year and how to manage these data is a
big challenge. For instance, data generated by social media is
unstructured data. Companies have used only 5 per cent of their
structured data. We are dealing with high velocity of information
as more number of transactions is going on. For instance, our
database manages large volumes of data and process a large volume
of transactions for telecom companies and banks.
Have customers started to adopt big data
technology?
Lot of projects are underway to evaluate big data.
This is not going to disappear by 2013 but going to continue to
evolve year-on-year. Software and hardware that help customers take
advantage of the opportunity that big data presents.
Why they should adopt the technology?
Many of the clients are struggling to manage the
structured and unstructured data that they handle on a daily basis.
They now realise if these large data are managed, stored and
analysed properly, it can give meaningful insights, which can help
in business productivity. Sectors like retail, healthcare, telecom
and BFSI can benefit a lot by deriving meaningful insights from big
data.