Big Data Is Big Business

Posted by: From DataCenterJournal Posted date: October 23, 2010 In: Big Data, Cloud, Commercial, Open Sources | comment : 0

I always get a kick out of it when people refer to data centers as this big warehouse of “data storage” and nothing else. I suppose it helps some people relate to what is on all of those computers residing inside. As much as readers here know that there is much more to the data center than just the data — the data is what is being protected and provided for within. The amount of data stored within devices in a typical data center has certainly grown in accordance with Moore’s Law, if not more so over the past decade or so.

Data is just the first step. With this massive amount of data stored in storage arrays in the data center, how do we take advantage of it and properly analyze it to extract valuable information, knowledge and wisdom? How do we get quality analytics out of the overwhelming quantity of data pouring in?

Analyzing and Interpreting Big Data

GigaOm interviewed Jeff Jonas, a Distinguished Engineer and chief scientist at IBM Entity Analytics Group. Jonas’ company Systems Research & Development was acquired by IBM in 2005. He has an impressive history of helping businesses leverage their information assets, and led the design and development behind the casino card counting systems, taking in data from all sources including MIT grads featured in the book titled Bringing Down the House and later the movie, 21.

Jonas shares some amazing insights into the information that is being created within the enterprise, and world, and how to make sense of it, and notes “as computers are getting faster and the world is getting more sensors, the organizations have been getting dumber. The percentage of what is knowable is on a decline.”

Also, in a recent meeting with the Sunlight Foundation, he presented about how to apply context accumulation process to automated computers system to streamline document review. He also compares the work he has done and seen in the casino industry to enabling the enterprise to move out of a batch processing system to more real-time analytics.

Big Data is Big Business

Om Malik also talks about the era of big data and recent acquisitions in the analytics and data warehousing industry. Data Center Knowledge reported on IBM’s acquisition of Netezza for $1.7 billion in cash, just after Oracle announced a cloud-based Exadata Elastic Service at Oracle World this year.