BigData and the hype

You must be hearing a lot of noise around the term BigData these days. What exactly is big data and how is it impacting the tech world?

As the name suggests, it is about data, a lot of data, huge data. What’s new? The amount and type of data. Data mining has already been an important part of any company right now, it helps them understand current trends and predict future upto a certain level. With BigData coming in, the concept is stretched further.

Let’s take an example, an ecommerce website wishes to understand customer behavior to improve its reputation and responsiveness. Where can it find the data, past sales, logs, customer activity on the website, blogs, facebook, twitter, google plus.. phew, that is tones of data. But the more data you can collect, a better decision you can make.

The challenges include- collection of data, search the relevant data, storage and most importantly the analysis i.e. conversion of raw data to useful information. Think about it, if a company can convert all the raw data related to its brand available on the various arenas to useful information like what people think about it, what are their exceptions, how to improve user experience etc, it will be a big win for the company.

Related post: http://kamalmeet.com/2013/03/infosys-launches-big-data-edge/