New tools driving big data analytics, survey finds
New technologies are enabling companies to perform increasingly sophisticated data analytics on very large and very diverse data sets, an upcoming report from The Data Warehousing Institute (TDWI) shows.
The report is based on responses from 325 IT managers, business users and consultants at small, medium and large companies.
Slightly more than a third of the respondents said they are currently running some form of advanced analytics on big data — mostly for business intelligence, predictive analytics, data mining and statistical analysis tasks.
Close to 45% of those surveyed expect that big data analytics will enable more accurate business insights while 38% are looking to use the technology to better recognize sales and market opportunities better. More than 60% are hoping that big data analytics can boost their company’s social media marketing capabilities.
The fastest growing use case for big data analytics is advanced data visualization, according to the TDWI survey. A growing number of companies are running sophisticated analytics tools on big data sets in order to build highly complex visual representations of their data.
“Big data used to be a technical problem when companies were struggling to deal with the management of large volumes of data,” said Philip Russom, a TDWI analyst and author of the report. “Now, if you apply analytics to it, there is a lot that can be gained from big data, that you could not get” from traditional BI and data warehousing technologies.
The term “big data” refers to very large data sets, often hundreds of terabytes or petabytes in scale. Increasingly, the term is used to describe not just large volumes of structured data but also unstructured data such as weblogs, clickstream data, machine and sensor data and social media data.
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