Who could have guessed just 15 years ago that most of us would be walking around with a device in our pockets that could serve as a mirror into our habits, desires, motives, needs and expectations? It has become undeniably clear that data is the new currency. Whoever wields this currency holds the power to gain insights that can serve existing customers, attract new clients, change lives, uncover breakthroughs, and innovate like never before. However, enterprises need banks to store this new digital currency safely if they wish to really transform it into something tangible and useful. The banks of the future aren’t really banks at all. The banks of the future are actually databases and platforms that store, display, and interpret acquired data. Take a look at the three industries that have the most to gain from the rise of Big Data.
Advertising Technology
The speed at which data accumulates on the Internet is enough to give any marketing professional whiplash. Waiting days, weeks, or even months for the impact of a print marketing campaign or television commercial to make a splash are over. The steady buildup of attention that used to result from marketing campaigns has been replaced by the lightning-fast reactions that follow virtual campaigns. The fact is that marketers need a way to measure and analyze reactions and traffic within seconds of deploying a marketing initiative. What’s needed is a data platform that can keep up. This platform needs to give marketers the power to react with immediate situational awareness.
One innovation that makes this possible is enterprise-grade batch and stream processing. Enterprises can use this technology to get real-time insights. The batch processing capabilities of one platform were recently put to use by the director of engineering for a global consumer technology company. They implemented the DataTorrent core engine into the company’s environment as a means of developing a streaming analytics platform to underline the company’s extensive advertising network. The end solution was to build DataTorrent into the existing Cloudera Hadoop environment with Flume connectors. As a result, the company’s previous batch analytics schedule of 45-minute updates was improved to provide less than one minute of latency between activity reports. This is as close to live as the industry can provide.
Financial Institutions
It is an understatement to say that data is important to enterprises that deal in the realm of numbers. However, Numbers alone aren’t what financial enterprises are actually looking for when analyzing data. What they really need to discover is how numbers interact with other numbers and what it could mean. In fact, lending institutions are increasingly relying on Big Data instead of the traditional route of checking FICO scores when approving loan applications. A robust processing platform will help countless enterprises with the ingestion of multiple data sources at high rates. This gives users the ability to stream in data from multiple sources to find connections and causes. It also makes it possible to see numbers as they relate to different variables.
The ability to see and analyze multiple data streams on one platform is a win for any enterprise. Manually piecing together a streaming analytics solution from open-source components could cost much time, money and resources from a support perspective. This reality is often not realized by a business when weighing the upfront costs of converting to a more advanced data platform. Recent ESG research found that many decision makers were skeptical about how long it would take to realize value from a new analytic solution. The real-time impact provided by a good Big Data analytics platform can help enterprises to see a return on investment almost as quickly as the first batch of data is streamed.
The Internet of Things
Data matters because data is a part of everything that we do. Every electronic device, vehicle, building or other component of our daily life that is capable of receiving and transmitting data holds important insights into the needs, habits, and expectations of the consumer. Even the Vice President of the United States has announced an initiative that will use big data to speed the pace of progress towards preventing and curing cancer.
With billions of people constantly tapping into mobile and electrical devices around the clock, enterprises need data platforms that can handle billions of events daily in order to gain insight that will drive results. With the amount of information being exchanged and recorded on a regular basis, Big Data analytics is crucial in these three major institutions among many more in the future.
