As an Engineer friend of mine says, "The nice thing about a standard is that you have so many to choose from!" Yes, standards seem to ebb and flow as needs require. Nailing down the exact definition of Big Data can present problems, too. Another of my friends says, "I'm not sure what Big Data is, but I know it when I see it!"
Most of us know Big Data when we see it, for we see huge amounts of collected information that we're not sure how to tame. Terabytes of data start flowing into our databases, IT managers start screaming for more storage, DBAs start telling us they need different software to manipulate it, and all the while our marketers still pull out their spreadsheets to do their analysis! What's a business owner to do?
Maybe I cannot provide a definition of Big Data that will work for everyone, but perhaps I can describe a couple of ways to use it.
CLI developed several products that make use of a lot of data (Is "a lot of data" a good definition of Big Data?). With many of our products such as Matchback, MatchXL, Match360, Hindsight, and others, we capture enormous amounts of data to which we apply sophisticated algorithms that allow marketers to tame the data and understand the important parts of it to make good business decisions. So, perhaps it's not the amount of data that should gather our attention, but maybe we should focus on asking the right questions of the data regardless of how big the data. Yes, that makes sense to me.
Whether we gather megabytes, gigabytes, terabytes or petabytes of data really isn't the important part, for if we do not ask the right questions of the data, none of it will prove worth much at all. So, how about this? Let's find ways to ask the right questions of all this data that we're gathering and start making the quality of the questions more important that the quantity of the data. If we do that, we will tame the Big Data animal and move on to more important questions, such as, "Why is there air?"
Call or email us today to find out more about taming and using Big Data.