ization and commodity hardware
have reduced the costs significantly, making big data available to small
and medium-size businesses.
Those smaller businesses also
have another path to big data
analytics: the cloud. Cloud services
for big data are popping up, offering platforms and tools to perform
analytics quickly and efficiently. In
fact, use of the cloud helps solve the
big data scalability issue, for both
data storage and computational
capability.
But do smaller businesses really
need access to big data? Simply put,
yes. All companies have big data,
whether they realize it or not. For
example, most online businesses
collect large volumes of data from
their log files and clickstream data.
For companies with smaller data
streams, storing gigabytes rather
than terabytes of information,
big data tools let them tap into the
vast trove of publicly available data
sources.
Take, for instance, FlightCaster, a
website that predicts flight delays —
often with better accuracy than the
airlines themselves. FlightCaster
mines large amounts of histori-
cal data on domestic flights and
factors in real-time conditions, as
well as other proprietary elements,
using much of the same (public)
data available to the airlines. Flight-
Caster’s secret sauce is its practical
understanding of big data analytics
and the application of the proper
tools to calculate the outcome in
real time.
Growth Mechanism
As costs fall and companies think
of new ways to correlate data, big
data analytics will become more
commonplace, perhaps providing
the growth mechanism for small
companies to become large enterprises. Consider that Google, Yahoo
and Facebook were all once small
companies that leveraged their
data and their understanding of the
relationships in that data to grow
significantly. It’s no accident that
many of the underpinnings of big
data came from the methods those
businesses developed. But today,
these methods are widely available
through Hadoop and other tools for
enterprises such as yours. n
FraNk J. ohlhorSt is a technology professional specializing in products and services
analysis. he writes for several technology
publications, including Info World.
