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SA treads carefully in big data journey

Admire Moyo
By Admire Moyo, ITWeb's news editor.
Johannesburg, 04 Apr 2016
Organisations are beginning to consider big data in trying to understand how it adds value to their business, says Muggie van Staden, MD of Obsidian Systems.
Organisations are beginning to consider big data in trying to understand how it adds value to their business, says Muggie van Staden, MD of Obsidian Systems.

South African organisations are treading carefully in their big data journey.

So said Muggie van Staden, MD of open source solutions provider Obsidian Systems, in a recent interview with ITWeb.

There are several organisations, especially the big banks, that have already started their big data journey in SA, he pointed out.

According to Van Staden, enterprises that started this journey some two years ago are beginning to get a return on investment and implementing big data at a larger scale.

Nonetheless, he said, companies of all sizes are collecting huge volumes of data which they must manage and optimise in order to respond to market needs.

"Some organisations are beginning to consider big data in trying to understand how it adds value to their business," he said. "Businesses need to have an understanding of how they can extract value from big data - if you don't see any value in anything, it becomes difficult to convince business to implement it."

Local companies are looking at how they can make use of big data to help with data offload from existing systems, Van Staden pointed out, adding that they are looking at how to take some of their core data out of traditional storage and put it into Hadoop clusters. "They are also looking at how to take load off some of their analytics systems."

More than three-quarters of companies are investing or planning to invest in big data in the next two years, according to a recent survey of IT and business leaders by Gartner.

"As big data becomes the new normal, information and analytics leaders are shifting focus from hype to finding value," says Lisa Kart, research director at Gartner. "While the perennial challenge of understanding value remains, the practical challenges of skills, governance, funding and return on investment come to the fore."

IDC says by 2020, the volume of data generated worldwide will have multiplied 10 times compared to 2013.

Van Staden is of the view that big data is very trendy now. "Everybody wants to do big data now but the challenge is realising value out of it. Everybody can go out and say: 'I've got a big data cluster' but that doesn't mean they are getting value out of it."

As a concept, he explained, big data is continuously evolving. In essence, it describes any voluminous amount of structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data that has the potential to be mined for information.

"Challenges include analysis, capture, data curation, search, sharing, storage, transfer, visualisation, and information privacy. The term often refers simply to the use of predictive analytics or other certain advanced methods to extract value from data, and seldom to a particular size of data set."

He believes that accuracy in big data may lead to more confident decision-making. And better decisions can mean greater operational efficiency, cost reductions and reduced risk.

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