Data has always been around. As we progress further in the digital world, the volume of data collected from various transactions and interactions are increasing at a rapid pace. In the early part of the digital revolution it was realized that to make sense of data it needs to be “structured” and stored in a way which highlights its “relationships” with other pieces of data. Once the data was stored in a relational format, it spawned the analysis of this data for competitive advantage and gave birth to the business intelligence revolution.
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The business intelligence applications slowly grew in their analytical capabilities and now are powerful enough to look at large sets of relational data. But a strange new thing has happened, a lot of new kind of data which does not fit into the relational paradigm is now being generated at a breathtaking speed – e.g. social media free text data, videos, audios, blogs, machine data, sensor data, telematics data, photographs, etc. These kinds of data were earlier ignored as the computing power available was not able to make sense of this data.
But now as computing power has increased and corporates realize that there is a lot of meaning hidden in the deluge of data, a new revolution has started which wants to look at this new age data and dig out insights for furthering business goals. The analytics tools and processes required to understand this data is still getting evolved and people are looking for newer and better tools. This whole new area of interest has been termed “Big Data Analytics” which is basically a thinking which proposes that an organization look at all the data they collect and generate and use it for generating business insights. It requires a mindset of “discovery” because it’s like finding a needle in a haystack!
Analytics and "Internet of Things"
According to the Gartner’s recent Magic Quadrant for BI & Analytics Platforms, the last 10 years of analytics was driven primarily by customer-oriented companies or the "Internet of People." The next 10 years will be driven by investments in applications that use the "Internet of Things" – the rapidly growing global network of connected devices.
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“The increasingly connected and always-on world means that data is being generated all the time. Businesses and consumers who equip themselves with the right technology can benefit substantially from the advanced insights provided by this quantity of data,” says James Richardson, Senior Director, Product Marketing, Qlik.
According to James, old fashioned business intelligence tools will soon be displaced by a new generation providing users with insightful and genuinely impactful analytics. He says, “Increasingly easy-to-use and intuitive technology will provide the average employee or consumer with access to the world of data discovery by encouraging the natural analyst within all of us.”
Qlik, a leader in user-driven Business Intelligence (BI), is one of the fastest growing software companies. A disruptive force in the BI industry, Qlik is working with 31,000 organizations around the world. In India, companies such as Mahindra & Mahindra and HDFC Life are using the QlikView Business Discovery platform to make better decisions for their business.
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Traditionally, data was considered to be a lot more finite and organized than what it is today. In simple terms, unstructured or voluminous data can be termed as Big DATA.
According to Anil Batra, Managing Director, Riverbed India, Big data drives public cloud storage. In 2014, Big Data gets even bigger with the additional information being created by the “Internet of Things”. In 2014, companies will have evolved their people, process, and technology enough to yield significant business value from Big Data investments. This rise of big data applications puts unprecedented pressure on storage strategies and technologies. In 2014 expect two things: 1) in house, companies need to find a combination of robust storage hardware and software that allow for quick access to relevant information; and 2) as data storage needs increase, more companies will turn to cheaper and more available public storage cloud services to offset spiraling costs.
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“The IT market is changing dramatically. The advent of mobility, cloud services, social collaboration, and business intelligence is changing what partners need to sell, who they can sell to, and how they need to go to market,” says Meetul B. Patel, General Manager - SMS&P, Microsoft India.
“The IoT offers businesses the opportunity to develop new services, enhance productivity and efficiency, improve real-time decision making, solve critical problems, and develop new consumer experiences,” says Srinivas Tadigadapa, Director – Enterprise Sales, Intel – South Asia,
The Intel Quark technology will help extend Intel’s reach to rapidly growing areas, from the Internet of Things to wearable computing in the future. With Intel Quark technologies, Intel is extending the flexibility and scalability of the x 86 ecosystems which encompasses more than 40 years of compute innovation and standards into new markets. This trend is being driven by increasingly connected devices, seamless connectivity from sensors to the datacentre, cloud economics for compute and data and the acceleration of big data analytics to extract value from data.
Big Data Analytics:
The way relational data analytics was driven was by having a set question in your mind and then attacking the data for answers e.g. How much sales happened across the northern region B class cities in the last month. In case of BIG data you are not sure about the question! You have to start off with an hypothesis and then see if the huge data set in front of you has any insight to throw to you. E.g. Is there a particular path of clicks that people prefer over other paths when they choose to buy a particular product and actually buy it? So, the basic paradigm of the analytics is different.
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In yesteryears, there were only a few sources from which data originated. However, new age technology disruptions have led to a massive explosion in data – with new channels of generating data – mobile devices, meters, Social Media, Web logs to name a few. The rate at which voluminous and different forms of data is being generated is phenomenal.
“Analytics and data will drive the industry forward in the coming year,” says Debasis Chatterji, CEO, Netxcell Limited.
According to IBM, there are three major drivers for Big Data:
Big Data Analytics:
IBM Big Data analytics offerings are designed and affordable putting advanced capabilities once available only to large enterprises now within reach for SMBs to help them generate insights throughout the business where executives can now anticipate, predict and shape business outcomes. Some offerings include IBM Cognos Express, IBM Cognos Insight and IBM SPSS Modeler.
Cloud: Private and Public
• IBM's cloud offerings are helping SMB clients reduce their IT costs while providing greater IT and flexibility with the same levels of reliability and security that clients have been receiving "on premise".
• These includes private cloud solutions such as SmartCloud Entry while public cloud SaaS offerings include SmartCloud for Social Business to better integrate and share data across remote locations and improve collaboration between employees, customers and partners. In addition, the hybrid cloud offering IBM Cast Iron Cloud Integration enable the safe and secure movement of data between cloud environments.
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Mobile
• IBM offerings enable SMBs to take advantage of the new opportunities and transformational capabilities of mobile. Using the recently announced IBM MobileFirst solutions, small businesses can now streamline everything from the management of employee mobile devices, to the creation of a new mobile commerce app that will transform their entire business model.
• SMBs that want to develop their own applications can use IBM Mobile First Platform, or use IBM Mobile First Development Services if they don't have the skills in-house. IBM MobileFirst Security can enable advanced security and compliance for web and mobile.
Big Data Changes the approach to Analytics
Big Data is a large collection of disparate information sets from a variety of sources which when interpreted and processed through a series of multiple complex algorithms, gives some sense of reasoning to a particular behavior, profile, ontology or circumstance.
Strangely, it is the individual and their personal preferences and patterns, complemented by multiple channels of interaction, be it the internet, social or the mobile combines with various personal, public and enterprise applications that create a humungous amount of discrete data elements that each could represent a pattern through which unique behaviors of the individual specifically, or a combined view of similar individuals can be logically simulated.
“These in-turn could be used by business, social or political entities to reach out to the respective community or the specific individual in a more exclusive manner. Need of such organizations to be most effective to their target audience makes Big Data the holy grail through which more accurate relevance could be achieved,” says Babla Sharan, Senior Vice President, Global Operations, Regalix.
“The advent of Big Data has ushered a new era of analytics as traditional business intelligence that revolves around data warehousing, enterprise information management etc. will not suffice. With volume, velocity and variety of datasets, Big Data analytics calls for an interdisciplinary approach of business, applied math, technology, design thinking and behavioural sciences fused together to address critical business challenge,” says Deepinder Singh Dhingra, Head of Products and Strategy, Mu Sigma.
Big data is going to change the course of traditional BI as we know it. The future of Big Data analytics will see some newer trends like Intelligent Systems that can be distilled into integrating data and analytics capability into a machine to optimize its usage pattern. And also Advanced Data Visualization and analytics tools, that goes beyond the traditional BI dash boarding and reporting view to a more sophisticated yet intuitive ‘cockpit’ view, by utilizing advanced visualization frameworks and tools that empower better analytics consumption.
None of the traditional BI tools have the ability to work with unstructured data or large volumes. Hence, the landscape is undergoing a sea change. Big data requires the ability to not only process faster, but process a wide variety of data – both structured and unstructured - and also the ability to store huge volumes of data. New tools are fast emerging to address these challenges.
The capture, integration, aggregation, storage and analysis processes of an IT organization have to change due to Big Data. The traditional BI tools have to be augmented with new-gen analytics tools. The decision to have cloud based analytics services versus on premise BI will have to be taken based on the specific priorities of each enterprise.
With the huge amount of data at their disposal, companies are realising the wealth of information that they can mine to gain insights into their customers, business processes etc., leading to greater demand for Business Intelligence and analytics services. “Organizations will have the ability to not only harness data of all types as part of making proactive business decisions but also obtain more useful information for business insights, improve the fidelity of existing information through the process of validation, and improve ti me to decision making. Big Data presents many possibilities for enterprises and today’s CIOs understand this and consider Big Data and Business Analytics a top priority,” says Rajesh Rege, Senior Vice President, Data Center, Virtualisation and Cloud Cisco India & SAARC.
“The increase of smart devices giving rise to data usage from multiple application and social media proliferation will see the increase in demand for big data. Management of this data and more importantly big data analytics present a huge opportunity for us,” says Mohammad Salman – Sr. Vice President – HCL Services Ltd.
Big data is becoming increasingly main stream as businesses realize its benefits, including improved operation efficiency, better customer experience, and more accurate predictions. However, companies are often challenged by the complexities of traditional server solutions. Big data solutions must enable high performance and scale as the business demands.
To meet these requirements, IT organizations should consider an architectural approach which integrates compute, storage, and network and can scale as the business demands. Cisco and its partners understand the importance of effective big data infrastructure, and are working with the leading big data to offer solutions that meet their demands.
The approach and the changes that Big Data brings in can be defined by associating with what matters to the line of business you are in.
Conventional analytics have given away to segmented, powerful, targeted, vertical specific tools that you can leverage through Big Data. Analytics can be broadly looked up in 4 categories- Descriptive Analytics, Diagnostic Analytics, Prescriptive Analytics and Predictive Analytics.
From a simple text, numbers driven data analytics to as complex as Spatial Data Management, Machine Learning, Operations Management, Speech Recognition, DNA Analysis, today’s business demands extremely deep analysis.
“Data analytics today is a powerful tool that can be exploited by every company provided they have the right approach. The key is to focus on the big decisions for which if you have better data, you have better analytics leading to predictability, optimization, growth & profits,” says Raj Neravati Chief Operating Officer at Cigniti Technologies.
Market players would allocate more time and funds towards devising enterprise mobile strategies that are more attuned to gauging emerging consumer needs rather than utilize the conventional reactionary approach. “This will entail investments in big data analytics tools and systems that can navigate through the complex architecture of the digital world and utilize advanced algorithms to intelligently decipher critical information about consumers and the marketplace,” says Faisal Husain, Founder and CEO, Synechron.
Traditional analytics look at interpretation of data in logical blocks and executing certain pre-determined patterns to present either a report or a recommendation. Big Data, however, changes the paradigm and looks at devising new question and hypothesis to arrive at various what if scenarios that can then be looked at as different perspectives to a problem and then interpreted accordingly.
Your Big Data strategy has to have a clear BI strategy, be it in-house analysis of all the data generated across all touch points or an external agency based strategy. You need to have one now. The competition is heating up and almost all major banks, Telcos, automotive, utility firms are engaged in deep product assessments and proof of concept. They have already started to see a lot of value by analyzing such data and are linking the insights developed via BIG data to their traditional relational data based insights. The two together bring up even more interesting possibilities and it is imperative to have a unified data strategy which has traditional analytics and BIG data analytics as the two supporting pillars.
Leading BI and Big Data Technologies Provider Saxon Global has recently acquired Bangalore-based company - ‘Wit Innovation’, a high-growth mobility and Solutions specialist.
Wit Innovation has a world-class delivery centre in Bangalore with a resource base of talented and skilled mobility engineers. With widely diversified industry portfolio of Financial Services, Health Care, Media, Hospitality & Entertainment sector, this acquisition expands Saxon Global’s worldwide technology portfolio with a key focus on enterprise mobility, Cloud & Business Intelligence.
Gopi Kandukuri – Founder and CEO, Saxon Global says, “Saxon Global is a highperforming ITSolutions Company, our commitment to unleash the power of technology certainly means that we are always looking for opportunities to bring the best resources, expertise and inventive service offerings to our clients globally.”
He added, “With the acquisition of Ideas Software and Consulting Pvt. Ltd (ISAC Global) in December 2012, our aim was to boost Saxon’s expertise in big data analytics and web intelligence and complement its business intelligence and data warehousing solutions offering. Now, with Wit Innovation, we continue to strengthen our core offerings with the addition of high-performance mobile development centers, skilled engineering talent and deep vertical market expertise.”
“We at Wit Innovation have always kept our customers first. As a lot of our long time customers started to demand several services in emerging technologies like BI and Cloud apart from enterprise mobility, we thought it may be best to merge with a company which can help fulfill our customers need and we found a perfect match in Saxon Global. With these added services, size and presence across the globe, we are looking forward to provide even more value to our existing customers and add new customers.“ said Sachin Garg – CEO & Co-Founder of Wit Innovation.
‘Wit Innovation’ was started in 2006 and specializes in building products on Smartphone’s and Tablets for its global clientele. They have worked with clients across 16 countries during the last 7 years and have built products and expertise working on platforms ranging from iOS, Android, BlackBerry and Windows Phones among others.
“With over 7 years of experience in the field of Enterprise Mobility, the next logical step for Wit Innovation was to integrate with evolving companies in Cloud & BI. Saxon Global was a perfect fit for us. This integration will facilitate larger customer base to offer integrated services. With this development, Wit Innovation has become a dominant Enterprise Mobility Solutions Provider. We see tremendous growth opportunities for us, as we reach our next level of customer base and delivery, said Vibhor Gupta, COO & Co-Founder of Wit Innovation.
The deal also adds an impressive list of clients to Saxon Global’s client portfolio, as well as the opportunity to expand client relationships in high growth market sectors such as Financial Services, Health Care, Media, and Hospitality& Entertainment.
Big Data Challenges for SMbs
One myth regarding BIG data is that the technologies available are expensive and they actually don&rsquo ;t give any results. That usually happens as people start looking at working with open source technologies without actually understanding how to use them and then get frustrated. What the SMB’s actually need is a platform which they are comfortable working with in terms of technical knowhow and yet gives them the power of analyzing BIG data and generate insights which give them competitive advantages like – fraud management, cost reduction, churn reduction, predictive analytics, etc.
SMB’s can also look at financial strategies to reduce Capex in their initiatives through leasing or cloud based models. But more important than that is the investment they must now make in developing the right skillsets for handling the analytical and “discovery” based requirements of analyzing BIG data. So, with a proper strategy in place together with a business case and financial model in place along with the right skill sets SMB’s are poised to gain a lot from BIG data analytics.
Big data might not be a matter of immediate concern for many SMBs, though there could be a few exceptions. For some, the traditional data store and BI tools would do. However, the power that the new-gen tools bring in from a processing and storage perspective can be harnessed by SMBs to further their business objectives. An SMB should start with a well thought out Big Data strategy, investing in on-premise storage or BI tools at the beginning and evaluate how things go. They can use cloud based storage and BI services as well. One other aspect that an SMB needs to focus on is to manage the data better.
IBM is helping SMBs drive a paradigm shift in which problems are anticipated and resolved proactively rather than simply by reacting,” says Jyothi Satyanathan, Director, Mid-market and Inside Sales, IBM India South Asia. The growing use of technologies such as Big Data analytics, cloud, social and mobile among small and medium businesses are opening up new opportunities, identifying new markets while leveling the playing field to compete with larger competitors. Many SMBs have struggled to adopt big data and private cloud solutions due to lack of in-house skills and expertise to design and maintain commodity hardware-based systems. IBM is addressing these issues with new Power Systems that don’t require specialized skills and offer the latest advances in virtualization and automation to speed private and hybrid cloud creation. IBM's Power Systems for SMBs come optimized with IBM Big Data analytics leveraging the same technology used in the Watson Jeopardy Challenge – bring that level of advanced technology to SMBs at a price point consumable for them.
SMBs are no different than large enterprises as long as they are catering to a large set of end consumers - especially in a B2C environment, only that they would need to combine their enterprise data with a lot of publicly available information and co-relate the same for relevance to their particular industry. “Key issue will be cost of such services, hence service providers on the cloud who can offer solutions on a transaction-based or package-based model will be more effective,” says Babla Sharan of Regalix.
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