Monday, August 19, 2013

Big Data growth in tools or in Information Mediaries?

Where is the growth going to be for Big Data? Where are the money makers going to be? As we look at the current market of companies putting out Big Data tools, all promising to make Hadoop easier to use and only garnering 10% of the up an coming bubbled market.

Personally, I know many people in IT departments and they are overworked getting the business projects they are working on complete and on time and do not have a whole lot of time or resources devoted to getting some new MapReduce tool to work in their data warehouse. I am certainly exaggerating and I know there are many working on Big Data in their IT department, but I think those of us who are chasing the money might be missing a very large development step in between.

Instead of Big Data tool maker selling its wares to a big company with a lot of data, what about the many companies who are putting the outputs of these efforts to work and selling the actual results of the data analysis. One such company is masFlight, who uses the platform they have worked hard to install as a service at an airline's site, to immediately analyze said data for the decision results an airline needs to have. masFlight is an excellent combination of smart data gurus who are taking their industry knowledge to create an industry solution. One step further is RetailNext, who does not even sell a solution platform, but instead the raw data output, primed for retail decision making. RetailNext claims to be the ultimate source for brick and mortar retailers in providing them with the in-store data they need.

So, to answer the Big Data money question ("Where is the money?"), we need to look not only at those companies making the tools like the Hortonworks and Clouderas, but also the information mediaries using these tools to provide the industry with the decision making data they need to get that competitive edge.

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