We are living in an enormous digitized world. Every day we are generating quintillion bytes of data knowingly or unknowingly. An online purchase, a single tweet or a Facebook comment, hourly climate information, a cell phone call; all contribute to building a large database. The old school database systems are facing technological limitation in managing and analyzing such a huge pool of information. This very limitation opens the door of opportunity for big data.

According to Wikipedia “big data is a collection of data sets so large and complex that it becomes difficult to process using on-hand database management tools”. In other words database which has grown to such an extent that are no longer manageable by traditional database tools are known as big data.

Extracting quality information from existing database is a primary challenge. Failing to analyze both internal and external data could cost organization heavily. For example understanding your online customer behavior will help you to get granular insights on following:

1. Which products are your customer’s searching for?
2. When are your customer’s visiting your online store and from which geography?
3. What are they doing at your website?
4. Why are customers not buying?

According to Duncan Stewart, Director of Deloitte Canada Research “IT companies are spending heavily on specialized systems such as ERP, Business Intelligence, Web Analytics which will generate industry revenue of between $1 billion to 1.5 billion at the end of 2012”.  In a podcast with Holly Seguine on deloitte.com he said “big data projects had total industry revenue of only $100 million in 2009. However 2012 will see 90 per cent of Fortune 500 companies will initiate big data projects.”

The major industries which are concentrating on big data project are:

• Social Media
• Media and News
• Online Gambling & Gaming
• Financial Services
• Online Retailing
• Web Analytics
• ERP Software

Few Quick Facts about Big Data

According to IDC market research the Global Big Data technology and services market is supposed to grow at a 39.4% compound annual growth rate (CARG) through 2015.

McKinsey & Company predicted 15 out of 17 sectors in the U.S. will have more data stored, per company, than the U.S. Library of Congress

Projected annual revenue increase will be 3.8% in the business analytics and enterprise software industry from 2012 to 2017 (source: inc.com)

Since big data technology helps you to analyze, manage and report data which are vital for decision making process for businesses. Big data helps you to determine which data are relevant and fit for deeper analysis from the not so relevant ones. Hence, will save the time, efforts and will contribute to the working efficiency.

With the advancement and successful implementation and improvement in technology in due course of time, it needs to be seen how the markets and industries use the Big Data to increase their competency for their business related activities.

Related Report : Big Data in ICT and Telecom: Transforming Industry Verticals 2012 - 2017

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