What can you really do with big data?

If any analyst, guru, visionary was asked the question; we would get an answer simillar to

 "transforms a business from a data-aware organization to data-driven organization"

This is management speak for good science: an organization does things, that generates data, which gets analyzed so you do things better, different, more or less based on what the effects are.  This paradigm does not change; call it data-driven, analytics-driven or a whole lot of other names; you just have more tools to work with so can see a bigger rearview mirror better.

does that make big data less useful? no- just make sure you know where you are and what you see.

The Big data pie

Following the money patterns is interesting, after much thought and staring at spreadsheets; the breakdown is

1. Professional services (35%): not a wonder since Apache Hadoop is free; its the vendors support that is the biggest slice of the pie
2. Compute (17%) is after all commodity hardware;
3. Storage (14%) was a surprise. Its the data that is growing but even with the falling storage costs.. this comes in a distant third.
4. Apps and Analytics (13%): the splunks, tableaus of the world are very small. compared to the large and growing pie.

Did I miss the professional services boat? probably, but the real work is yet to be done.

I have heard the toy elephant story many times, but seriously the numbers tell that the real elephant is IBM- well they took the elephant sized pie.. the rest well seem like crumbs.

Big data is big money

We are creating the data, we are storing, slicing dicing and presenting it but where is the money?

Big data is big business.  $18 billion last year, expected to grow up to $28 billion this year and keep on growing upto $50 billion in 2017. and who takes the largest slice of the pie?

Professional services take the biggest bite of the big apple. All the hadoop vendors are slightly under the #5 on the list Teradata which is less than half of #1 IBM.

Making the noise is one business and money is another business..