Brett Sheppard, Author at Gigaom

Putting Big Data to Work: Opportunities for Enterprises

Brett Sheppard — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 06:26:15 +0000

Business and IT leaders now face significant opportunities and challenges with big data. This is true across numerous industries, from health care and finance to travel booking sites and even sports.

In 2011, we’re seeing extraordinary growth of big data in these areas along three dimensions: volume, complexity and speed. Additionally, data science is contributing significantly to operational efficiencies in these sectors as well as enabling more sales growth and even brand-new business models.

This report, published in conjunction with the GigaOM Structure Big Data 2011 conference, explores the rapidly evolving big data business and technology ecosystem. It examines big data in the context of several different industries: financial services, health care, sports, travel and media. We explore the different big data technologies — from Hadoop and in-data analytics to cloud-based collaboration tools — and their various benefits for enterprises. And we examine some of the existing challenges big data poses, and what enterprise IT leaders can do to overcome them.

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Big Data 2011 Preview

Brett Sheppard — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 08:00:53 +0000

There’s more than a little truth in Google Chief Economist Hal Varian’s quip that “— the sexy job in the next ten years will be statisticians.” With enterprise data volumes moving past terabytes to tens of petabytes and more, business and IT leaders face significant opportunities and challenges from big data. For a large enterprise, big data may be in the petabytes or more; for a small or mid-size enterprise, data volumes that grow into tens of terabytes may become challenging to analyze and manage. Big data, though, is not just about cost control — there are sales-growth opportunities and even new business models from more advanced analytics.

Using cloud-computing technologies, organizations are experimenting with distributed data stores, cloud compute capacity for data analytics, hosted data integration and even operational databases in the cloud. Hadoop/MapReduce has moved past test/development to become a viable extension or alternative to traditional relational databases for managing and analyzing huge data sets. All of this makes 2011 an exciting year for benefiting from and managing big data.

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