by Angela Guess
Brian McKenna of Search Data Management reports, “Open source big data technologies seem stuck in the sand pit of experimentation in UK corporations. This has been a consistent theme in SearchDataManagement.co.UK interviews with people familiar with early big data implementations. Speaking at a Computer Weekly roundtable on the topic, Bob Harris, chief technology officer at Channel 4, said big data initatives will likely require organisations to adopt new technologies. ‘Some data problems are not appropriate [for conventional database] technologies because they are larger than what we can ask them to comfortably process,’ he said. ‘MapReduce was put into the hands of our users in 2011, and these are tools with sharp ends. However, I think the technologies are complementary’.”
McKenna goes on, “Eddie Short, a partner with KPMG advisory services, who heads the firm’s business intelligence practice, said that while ‘a lot of mainstream businesses are dabbling in big data, its appeal is more to out and out techies. And they won’t be getting their way ahead of the CIOs [who are] protecting the crown jewels [of IT infrastructure].’ But Short’s firm is encouraging clients to play around with big data. ‘They need to experiment and prepare for managed failure,’ he said, adding that there is ‘a big chasm building’ as companies wait for big data to become mainstream. Organizations using Hadoop — the open source big data processing technology created by the Apache Software Foundation — are also very much in the experimental phases.”
