Data is everywhere: at work, at home and at play. It?s in our computers, our televisions, our phones, our cars and our appliances. For decades, companies have been making business decisions based on transactional data stored in relational databases. Beyond that critical data, however, is a potential treasure trove of non-traditional, less/semi structured data like weblogs, social media, email, sensors, device logs and images that can be mined for useful information. This semi structured data is typically referred to as big data.
Last week, US enterprise software maker Oracle unveiled its strategy to help enterprises meet the challenges posed by big data and announced the availability of its Big Data Appliance in India. But first, a quick look at the business benefits of big data for some of the industries. In the delivery of healthcare services, management of chronic or long-term conditions is expensive. Use of in-home monitoring devices to measure vital signs, and monitor progress is just one way that sensor data can be used to improve patient health and reduce both office visits and hospital admittance. Big data technologies can help healthcare sector predict and more quickly react to clinical events.
With the increase in the amount of devices, the amount of data will also be generated exponentially. This will result in a large volume of data to be analysed for most of the large scale manufacturing, product design, engineering and maintenance processes in existence. And in retail sector, companies usually have record of customers who buy their products. Big data technologies can help them get insights from social media and web log files from their e-commerce sites and can help them understand who didn?t buy and why they chose not to, information which was not available to them earlier.
Sundar Ram, vice-president, technology sales consulting, Asia Pacific, Oracle, says, ?Organisations across verticals are faced with the challenge of acquiring, organising and analysing this enormous amount of digital data to make better business decisions. There is a strong latent demand for big data and analytics platforms in the market.? He adds: ?We believe that verticals like BFSI, retail, media, and government sectors will adopt big data immediately owing to the enormous data flow, while sectors such as healthcare and telecom are likely to be among the early adopters before most verticals adopt Big Data solutions.?
Oracle?s Big Data approach is focused on engineered systems and is aimed at making big data initiatives practical for the enterprise. ?Oracle?s Big Data strategy is centered on the idea that customers can evolve their current enterprise data architecture to incorporate big data and deliver business value, leveraging the proven reliability, flexibility and performance of their Oracle systems,? says Sundar.
But the problem is not the creation of data, rather how enterprises can locate the relevant information to do deeper and more sophisticated analysis of this data and use it in real time. To make the most of big data, enterprises are now looking at evolving their IT infrastructures to handle the rapid rate of delivery of extreme volumes of data, with varying data types, which can then be integrated with an organisation?s other
enterprise data to be analysed. In fact, the most recent annual survey on data warehousing by the Independent Oracle Users Group (IOUG) found that approximately 48% of enterprises expect a significant or moderate increase in the unstructured data analysis over the next five years.
In continuation with its strategy to deliver pre-integrated, pre-tested engineered systems for data management requirements, Oracle has introduced a new engineered system?Oracle Big Data Appliance that combines optimised hardware with a comprehensive software stack featuring specialised solutions to deliver a complete, easy-to-deploy solution for acquiring, organising and analysing big data. It is designed to deliver extreme analytics on all data types, with enterprise-class
performance, availability, manageability and security.
Oracle Big Data Appliance incorporates Cloudera?s Distribution including Apache Hadoop with Cloudera Manager, plus an open source distribution of R that has been enhanced to run the oracle database. Running on Oracle Linux, the system also features Oracle NoSQL Database and Oracle HotSpot Java Virtual Machine.
Sundar says, ?Oracle Big Data Appliance is architected to rapidly turnaround adhoc information requests, which otherwise take weeks, thus making the businesses very agile and it also help customers control IT costs by pre-integrating all hardware and software components into a single Big Data solution that complements enterprise data warehouses.? This unique approach
relieves enterprises off the integration involved in assembling a suitable set of hardware and software components to create big data architecture.
Today, there is enormous information floating on mobile networks, e-commerce sites, social networking sites, sensors, device logs and images waiting to be tapped and be mined for making useful business decisions. Needless to say, it?s time to use big data in a smart manner.