Companies Draw up Plans for Using Big Data

By Dick Weisinger in Formtek Blog, on June 8th, 2012

A surprisingly large number, 70 percent, of organizations are currently considering how Big Data projects can help their business.  20 percent of companies of companies in that group are already using Big Data on projects, 13 percent are piloting the technology, and 22 percent are planning to implement a Big Data project.  That’s the conclusion of an Informatica survey of 600 global IT and business professionals.

The two main reasons organizations are interested in Big Data are that they think that by using it that they can improve the efficiency of their business operations, and they think that it will improve their business agility.

• 74 percent of organizations are targeting the analysis of their large transaction data volumes.  These organizations typically target the use of Hadoop and NoSQL.
• 35 percent of organizations are trying to glean insight from social media data
• 33 percent of organizations have collected mobile data that they would like to analyze
• 22 percent of organizations have large amounts of machine-generated data that they wish to analyze

Girish Pancha, chief products officer for Informatica, said that ”The reality is, big data represents both opportunities and challenges.”  Those challenges include:

• 52 percent don’t have the right skills in using big data analysis tools
• 39 percent aren’t able to address the real-time collection of data
• 38 percent worry that the data they have may not be of good quality
• 38 percent are concerned with data security and privacy issues involved in processing their data
• 35 percent don’t think they have the right developer skill sets to manage Big Data
• 34 percent think that the use of Hadoop is overly complex
• 32 percent think that their governance capability for Big Data is inadequate

IDC predicted that Big Data market will be big and grow from $3.2 billion in 2010 to $16.9 billion in 2015. This represents a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 40% or about 7 times that of the overall information and communications technology (ICT) market.