5 real-world uses of big data

In the past year, big data has emerged as one of the most closely watched trends in IT. Organizations today are generating more data in a single day than that the entire Internet was generated as recently as 2000. The explosion of “big data”–much of it in complex and unstructured formats–has presented companies with a tremendous opportunity to leverage their data for better business insights through analytics.

Wal-Mart was one of the early pioneers in this field, using predictive analytics to better identify customer preferences on a regional basis and stock their branch locations accordingly. It was an incredibly effective tactic that yielded strong ROI and allowed them to separate themselves from the retail pack. Other industries took notice of Wal-Mart’s tactics — and the success they gleaned from processing and analyzing their data — and began to employ the same tactics.

While data analytics was once considered a competitive advantage, it’s increasingly being seen as a necessity for enterprises–to the point that those that aren’t employing some kind of analytics are seen to be at a competitive disadvantage. Driven by the rise of modern statistical languages like R, there’s been a surge in enterprises hiring data analysts–which has in turn given rise to the larger data science movement. Data is a huge asset for enterprises, and they’re beginning to treat it accordingly.

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