by Angela Guess
Brian Hopkins of Forrester Research recently answered a few questions about the future of Big Data processing. Hopkins stated, “I think what technology consumers are going to see over the next 12 to 18 months is a whole rush of vendors incorporating big data capabilities into their technologies [and some] have already actually been doing it. They’re approaching the point where they’re going to start releasing versions of products that have that capability and so [consumers of technology are] going to be asking themselves, Is this important to me? I think that it’s really important to come up with an initial view of what [big data processing] means, [why] it’s important and what [organizations] should do about it right now while the technology is still in the very early stages.”
When asked about whether the term Big Data is a misnomer, Hopkins responded, “It’s a bit of a misnomer because people [equate big data to] big volume. [But] it’s really about volume, velocity, variability and variety. [Velocity obviously refers to] how quickly the data comes at you and so that incorporates into the scope of big data the notion of capturing a stream of data. Then high variability and high volume are also issues. [For example, there] may be a variety of formats [as opposed to] just one relationally structured data set. You could have data from a Web log, unstructured content from the Internet, content files that are tagged with metadata and hierarchical file systems. [The concept of big data addresses] how you deal with this variety of formats and how you draw meaning from them.”
Read more of Hopkins’ insights here.
