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In good old days when there was no Twitter or Facebook, businessmen used their sixth sense or their gut feeling to make sense of the feedback they received from their customers to separate the wheat from the chaff. But it looks like nothing has changed much, even in the current era of Big Data which uses data from various sources including, Twitter and other unstructured data and cannot be managed by traditional database methods.
Traditional method
“When using traditional data warehousing, you were dealing with largely known sources of data. With Big Data, it is ad hoc in nature,” Mr Sundar Ram, Vice-President, Technology Sales Consulting, Oracle Asia Pacific, said.
Partially agreeing with him, Ms Jaskiran Bhatia, Country Manager, Information Management Software Group, IBM India/South Asia, said that on the issue of gut estimates, it depends on how you look at it.
“The real challenge is the learning process concerning the compliance angle. You have to ask yourself: Is it right? Is it my view or the official view?” She said that people had to be careful with Big Data because it allows people to manage perceptions.
As a hypothetical example to understand what this means, consider this – a hotel chain opens a new restaurant in Bangalore and wants to carefully scan Twitter feeds for comments.
Should they pay more attention to tweets from Bangalore?
Will a negative comment from a person who didn't like the service in New Delhi impact their Bangalore hotel's chances of growth? Big Data is slowly catching on because of the need to process huge amounts of unstructured data like the above example. As companies try harder to beat competition, they are increasingly going to rely on Big Data to get an edge. But the costs associated with Big Data in terms of processing power and storage is high and companies in India are still trying to figure out what to do with Big Data.
As Mr Hitesh K. Arora, Director, Head - Information Technology, Max New York Life Insurance, said, “It will take at least six months to one year for the hype to settle down. Companies will have to look at the cost of managing setup and the overhead costs.”
Marketing buzz
Mr Aman Munglani, Research Director, Gartner, said that Big Data will be the big marketing buzz in 2012. “Top decision makers will get involved in understanding the architecture. The revelation has set in that information is a valuable asset and the concept will gain attention. But people are still at the basic level of understanding what Big Data is.”
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