Big Data Analytics: Obstructers vs Promoters

Not a day goes by without hearing about Big Data.... It’s all over the news, vendors promoting their big data products, analysts predicting the future of big data and business deploying big data to gain insights.
Technology follows adoption life cycle, which means there are certain stages technology should go thru to become mature and prevalent. Obviously during the adoption lifecycle, there will be always people not adopting the technology considering it worthless and labeling Big Data as Big Fuss. Let's call them the “Obstructers". On the other side of the field, there are the Big Data supporters, which I will call them "Promoters".

I have the following message for the “Obstructers”: Big data is a big business... In few years businesses without Big Data will not be relevant any more. It is the information era and businesses who will be still relying on "traditional" analytics tool and limiting themselves with existing data sources, will meet their demise. 

IDC predicts the Big Data and Analytics market will grow 50%, from $40 Billion in 2014 to $60 Billion by 2019. With innumerable sources of data, if we can only analyze it effectively, we will usher in a new dawn of actionable insights that will drive transformation, innovation, and profits. It is obvious that Big Data by itself will not solve any long standing social and economic problems, in areas of education, healthcare, public policy, workforce efficiency, supply chains, and so on. In fact, utilizing Big Data could help us understand and gain insights into the problems.
Imagine the marketing department wants to explore whether certain attitudinal measures drive tangible benefits to the business and to better understanding customer behavior. Easy enough. Survey the customers, collect the data and analyze it. By the time the analysis will be completed, there is a high chance that the customer behavior has changed, because of a negative comments posted on Facebook.

The famous 3Vs of Big Data: Velocity, Volume and Variety
Big Data was designed having the 3Vs in mind. Velocity is the speed of the data generation, Volume is the size of the data, while Variety is the different types of data. It is a no brainer that businesses without Big Data deployment, are not able to cope with the ever increasing the speed of data, the sheer size of data from different sources. Thus Big Data is an important leap for businesses to take in order to ensure their continuity.

If you are satisfied with your traditional non-Big Data tools, my condolences to you…

I have the following message for the “Promoters”: Keep up the good work… You are magnificent and zealous people who have undertaken a great mission… You just need to have little more patience, soon the “Obstructers” will finally grasp the true value of Big Data.

Conclusion
The promise of Big Data is sexy and prone to attention grabbing headlines. There is certainly no doubt that Big Data is the future, however remember “Only The Brave” will win at the end.