by Angela Guess
Timothy Prickett Morgan of The Guardian has written an article regarding how small to medium sized businesses can take advantage of relatively inexpensive Big Data tools. He writes, “It may take a while but eventually any good technology embraced by large enterprises trickles its way down to small and mid-sized businesses in some appropriately modified and re-priced form. It will be no different for modern business analytics tools. The time could be ripe for mid-range customers to start thinking about either modernising their data warehouses or data marts if they are lucky enough to have any, or come up with a plan to install a business analytics platforms if they don’t.”
He continues, “Today’s tools are not only much more sophisticated but are affordably priced for mid-market customers. The level of performance they offer gives these smaller companies what they need to compete in the global marketplace. Everybody is talking about big data these days, but the term is really a misnomer. Fast data is probably a better term. Companies of all sizes are wrestling with making sense of diverse structured, semi-structured and unstructured data sets to help them make quick decisions. Dell, which does not usually get into markets if it doesn’t think it can make a good profit, particularly from the small and medium businesses that it still peddles a lot of its gear to, is cooking up the Quickstart Data Warehouse Appliance. It is based on Dell’s new PowerEdge 12G servers and Microsoft’s SQL Server 2012.”
