Every day, new technologies and terminology pop up, but quickly disappear into the abyss as they are replaced with the next greatest thing.
A phenomenon that recently started doing the rounds was that of big data, and when companies started talking about it, many thought it would be a passing trend so did not really pay much attention to it. Those that did take notice of it didn't have the knowledge or the technology to deal with it.
But now, a couple of years down the line, big data has become a part of our daily lives, and it will have a lot to do with how businesses remain competitive in the future.
"Every company has read about big data, but has not fully grasped what it actually is and how it can be used," says Greg Hanson, senior director EMEA Technical Operations at Informatica.
In the past, businesses used to consider computers, servers, printers and the like as assets, and although they still are, the biggest asset a company can have is data. Data is no longer a by-product of the business - it is becoming the business. As Andreas Weigend, former chief scientist at Amazon once said, data is the new oil, and he wasn't wrong.
But, for this data to become an asset, it has to be clean, safe and connected. It has to be sorted, cleaned, stored, managed and easily accessible for companies to leverage maximum benefits from it.
This is why Informatica, a company that specialises in helping companies turn their raw data into valuable insight, is hosting the Informatica Day conference on 21 October, in Johannesburg.
The half-day event is designed to bring the data community's brightest minds together to discuss the role of data in the real-time digital enterprise of the future.
"A business receives its data from multiple sources," continues Hanson. "For example, e-mails, faxes, comments from Facebook and tweets are all being absorbed in large quantities on a daily basis. The problem is that these data sets are unstructured, meaning that they arrive in different formats and are often delivered to different company departments," he says.
For a company that wants to see their client's response to services it offers, it needs all of this information in a central repository in order to gain a holistic and accurate perspective from which it can make an informed decision in real-time. It can then make adjustments to the service based on the feedback it is receiving from it customers, thus keeping them happy, instead of seeing them flock to a rival company.
How does this translate into real life?
Most modern cars have hundreds of sensors that monitor everything from oil temperature to whether or not its passengers are wearing their seat belts. The car also contains sensors around the engine to ensure everything is running smoothly, and should a problem arise, the driver is notified and the problem is logged in the car's computer. It is now up to the driver to take the car to the dealership to get the problem sorted out.
Now, let's take this one step further and imagine the car is connected to the Internet. "When the fault arises, the driver is automatically warned and so is the dealership. This means that by the time the owner gets the car to the dealership, a mechanic knows about the problem and is ready to fix it. No troubleshooting or asking the customer what the problem is," he comments.
But now, there are typically numerous problems associated with a fault on a car, so a dealership won't just be receiving one message, but instead hundreds - all relating to the same fault. Also, a decent car dealership would be connected to thousands of cars on the road, meaning the dealership that has the technology, resources and business processes in place to be able to absorb this data and act on it timeously is the one that will come out on top.
"This is, however, just the tip of the big data iceberg," continues Hanson.
As more and more devices become smart in that they are connected to the Internet, and the IOT (Internet of Things) becomes more of a reality, it is anyone's guess as to the amount of data that will enter a company's databases. "It is for this reason that every company has some sort of a big data strategy and has deployed an information management platform similar to Informatica's Vibe virtual data machine in order to absorb, sort, access, analyse and act on the information in real-time," concludes Hanson.
Big data is here to stay and those companies that choose to ignore it, do so at their own peril.
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