Big data has been a reality for a few years now and has been part of the planning process for 2015 budgets for many enterprises. For the most part the initiatives have been driven by lines of business executives who are trying to be more efficient in their efforts and more agile in their capabilities. In addition, infrastructure execs look to be more cost effective in both their operational and capital spending.
I asked Tendu Yogurtcu, general manager of big data at Syncsort, to comment on what enterprises expect to achieve from their efforts with big data in the next year or so. Yogurtcu explained, “In 2014, enterprises allocated the majority of their resources towards pilot projects. As a result, one third of enterprises are already in production with a specific use case that targets operational efficiency, by reducing costs of traditional data warehouse architectures and offloading expensive workloads to Hadoop. Another third is focused on modern business intelligence and analytics platforms that increase agility, many with real-time dashboards and visualization of customer and sales data. The final third are taking a more conservative approach, budgeting their pilot project for 2015 and starting to invest in a data lake.
“Key aspects of planning include the data, the analytics platform, and the technologies and tools. Consolidation of a variety of data sources ensures data security and integrity.
“Platform selection is very important as the mindset of the C-suite has changed with big data disruption. Executives do not want to be locked-in by a specific vendor, and as a result aim for Hadoop and Cloud enabled flexible architectures. IT executives envision Hadoop as a main service implementation in the next three years, and many pilot projects use public cloud as a platform because of TCO and governance regulations in industries such as healthcare and finance.
“Technology stack and tools are another critical aspect, as the skill set gap has been the number one challenge in the big data technology adoption. We see customers who want to enable existing skills developing the data pipeline as usual without acquiring skills with a technology stack that is continuously evolving.
“2015 is expected to be the year executives see ROI from initial investments and add investments in broader infrastructure upgrades, now that most of the organizations have successfully implemented a use case and proved the value from big data through pilot projects.”
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