Every day, 2.5 quintillion (‘1' followed by 18 zeroes) bytes of data are created — from Facebook, digital pictures and videos and online transaction records.

By 2015, the market for this ‘big data' technology and services globally will reach $16.9 billion up from $3.2 billion in 2010, says research firm IDC. According to a Wikibon, the market for ‘big data' is expected to grow annually at 58 per cent to touch over $50 billion by 2017.

According to Mr Willie Hardie, Vice-President - Database Product Marketing, Oracle Corporation, ‘big data' is going to be the next wave in the IT industry. His area of expertise includes Oracle Database and Oracle Exadata and Oracle Real Application Clusters.

In a recent chat with Business Line , Mr Hardie dealt on length on what is this ‘big data' all about. Excerpts from the interview:

Everybody in the IT industry is today talking about ‘big data.' What is this all about?

Big data is the next wave in the IT industry. Big data sizes are a constantly moving target currently ranging from a few dozen terabytes to many ‘petabyte' of data.

Companies like Oracle see a huge opportunity to manipulate and understand customers' data. Lot of our customers in sectors like retail and banking are looking at big data project. Organise, analyse and integrate it in the business applications.

What sort of data?

There are a variety of data. Typically, to date, most database applications deal predominately with structure data, which neatly fits in a structured rows and columns. With big data, it is a complex, variety of data, which is unstructured.

For example, social media sites like Facebook or Twitter are throwing up millions of data sent out by people at a rapid rate.

So how should clients tackle such data flow?

The biggest challenge companies have is to first understand big data. We have this massive low identify information, which previously was never included in the day-to-day transaction business applications. To get value out of the big data, companies need to analyse the data and integrate that in to the business intelligence applications and intelligence dashboards that we are not looking at — information historically like what happened a month ago, what happened last year and looking all these information collectively to see how we can have an impact on our business.

What are IT companies dealing with?

They are dealing with large volumes of data that is growing exponentially every year and how to manage these data is a big challenge. For instance, data generated by social media is unstructured data. Companies have used only 5 per cent of their structured data. We are dealing with high velocity of information as more number of transactions is going on. For instance, our database manages large volumes of data and process a large volume of transactions for telecom companies and banks.

Have customers started to adopt big data technology?

Lot of projects are underway to evaluate big data. This is not going to disappear by 2013 but going to continue to evolve year-on-year. Software and hardware that help customers take advantage of the opportunity that big data presents.

Why they should adopt the technology?

Many of the clients are struggling to manage the structured and unstructured data that they handle on a daily basis. They now realise if these large data are managed, stored and analysed properly, it can give meaningful insights, which can help in business productivity. Sectors like retail, healthcare, telecom and BFSI can benefit a lot by deriving meaningful insights from big data.

raja@thehindu.co.in

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