by Angela Guess
Jennifer Scott recently shared her thoughts on why businesses need to jump on the bandwagon and embrace Big Data if they want to remain competitive. She writes, “Big data sounds like a headache to most companies and, in most cases, is becoming a serious migraine. The provisioning of storage to handle what one needs to keep is a challenge in itself, but to keep up with the ever-growing numbers feels like a continual race. Where big data really comes into play though is not how you store it but how you use it to your advantage.”
Scott quotes Collin Mahony, vice president of products and business development at HP, saying, “You might want to think of big data as being black sand… You just need a way to analyse all the black sand (the massive amounts of raw data), in real-time, to find the gold (the nuggets of useful information) when and where you need it.”
Scott adds, “This is the key. Having all this data, be it on the performance of your staff or the preferences of your customers, gives you more knowledge than ever before. Bring in the old adage of ‘knowledge is power’ and it seems big data is a big chance to know your market and your own company better than ever before, opening up new opportunities to grow. ‘Big data… offers a massive competitive advantage for the organisations that embrace [it] and its opportunities,’ added Mahony. ‘The companies that thrive in today’s information economy will be the ones that can find the commonalities and the outliers in the data to let them see usage trends as well as opportunities for improvements.’”
