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n the past 12 months no technology in the IT industry has been hyped as much as big data. Every large enterprise vendor wants to ride the hype wave and capture both mindshare and potential marketshare around big data. The channel community is viewing the developments cautiously, and while some of the solution providers are eager to address the opportunity, few have a go-to-market strategy in place. While some of the vendors have readied product lines to address the big data opportunity, few have a convincing channel delivery model in place that can help channels to generate sustainable revenue.
The data boom Big data, by definition, is the process of deriving meaning from a large quantity of structured and unstructured data in a very short span of time. While this has been the goal of IT systems and database systems for the past three decades, it has become a reality following the advent of a number of new technologies in both software and hardware in the past half a decade. And big data is riding a sharp growth curve. IDC predicts that big data technology and services will grow worldwide from $3.2 billion in 2010 to $16.9 billion in 2015. An IDC study commissioned by NetApp, Here Comes Big Data: Perspectives from Indian Enterprises, puts the market size at $153.1 million in India by 2014. A recent study by Informatica of the top 600 enterprises indicated that nearly 70 percent organizations are now considering, planning or running big data projects, with 44 percent considering, 22 percent planning, and rest running big data projects. “A NASSCOM study reveals that 90 percent of Indian Fortune 500 companies are likely to have big data initiatives underway by the end of the year. However, we believe that big data implementations have just begun rolling out globally, with Indian firms in the consideration phase,“ says Venkatesh Krishnan, Head, Systems Business, Oracle India. According to Krishnan, the biggest reason for an interest in big data has been the availability of big data. “According to analysts, data volume has grown over 900 percent in the last five years and is expected to grow at the rate of 40 percent year-on-year till 2020. Research indicates that people created 150 exabytes of data in 2005, and that the figure grew eight times to 1,200 exabytes by 2010. Four trends are driving this growth in data: the capture of detailed data more
frequently across every customer interaction; the prevalent use of multimedia; the widespread adoption of social media such as Facebook and Twitter; and the roll-out of intelligent sensors embedded in physical devices that can sense, create and communicate data.” Observing that customers are looking at ways to make better use of data, Ramendra Mandal, Country Manager, QlikTech India, says, “What makes big data captivatingly critical to organizations of all sizes is the competitive gap between enterprises that manage data effectively and those that do not.” Speed matters, notes Jaskiran Bhatia, Country Manager, Information Management, SWG, IBM ISA. “What is different now is velocity—the rate at which data is growing and the speed at which analysis needs to happen, and variety—multiple unstructured formats in which they receive this data such as Twitter feeds, sensor readings and GPS feeds. Today, devices which we earlier never considered as computing devices are generating so much data every second. For example, energy meters.” Another reason for solution providers to utilize big data better has been the availability of software tools that can handle both structured data and unstructured data better. Krishnan of Oracle estimates that around 120 open source tools NoSQL (non RDBMS) databases have evolved over the past few years. Says Rainer Hettinger, Principal, SAP Business Developer, Fujitsu Global, “You also have new techniques such as the Map Reduce algorithm and in-memory databases. SAP, for instance, has launched SAP Bana which takes advantage of low cost of main memory (RAM), the data processing abilities of multi-core processors and the fast data access of solid state drives to deliver better performance of analytical and transactional applications.” There have been several innovations on the hardware front which are helping customers to analyze big data better. “Over the past few years we have seen remarkable technology innovations in terms of multicore processors, faster bus speeds, and faster solid state drives including new innovations such as Fusion I/O and more cache memory. Today, servers perform the same amount of transactions as last decade’s supercomputers,” points out Sandeep Lodha, Director, Netweb Systems.
Getting more out of data While for many years customers have been
“We believe that big data implementations have just begun rolling out globally, with Indian firms in the consideration phase”
“Devices which we earlier never considered as computing devices are generating data every second. For example, energy meters, sensor readings and GPS feeds”
Venkatesh Krishnan
Jaskiran Bhatia, Country Manager, Information Management, SWG, IBM ISA
Head, Systems Business, Oracle India
Computer Reseller News
01/12/2012
www.crn.in
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