Introduction
Over the past years, the word “Big data” has gained popularity in competitive business world. Some consider big data concepts as the greatest thing and business growth opportunity that was never anticipated. According to international data corporation, it predicts the volume of stored and retrieved data will grow by about fortypercentages in the next five years.Reputable companies in the competitive business world largely depend on the data management, analysis and integration for effective decision making in regards to business growth. Therefore, data analytics is essential for success of the company in recent times thanks to changing technological achievements globally and large markets for businesses growth.
This paper, examines the concept behind the Term “Big data” as it has been commonly used in field of business growth and Information Technology respectively. In today’s competitive globe markets, business managers often uses data to make informed managerial decisions and analyze marketing projections for their success.This helps in understanding the customer’srequirements as business develops the products and services that preciselymeet their expectations. the concepts behind “BIG DATA” brings in a new level of adding value to competitive business world as they tries to reach large clientele base for their products and services globally. In it, the end-users enjoy the full packages such as integrated storage, data analytics and other applications that aids in efficiency, drive quality and produces higher level of customer satisfaction and experiences. Though, experts warn of the challenges big data would bring, its opportunities are huge to drive the business in top.
Before examining the very importance of the big data in business success, it is important to know the origin of the concept. Unlike many other Information Technology Trending synonyms, big data concept has puzzled end-users due to its numerous benefits it can offer. It is uncommon to hear small business chatting about the concepts probably due to lack of information and also due to its complexities. Unlike in traditional time where data management technologies has eased data storage in small and manageable volumes, increased data usage in large volume has been a major challenge many vendors faces in wake of increased reliance on data over the internet. And thus, big data is predicted to offer the solution for large volume of data provided in various types. Big data can therefore be defined as, the realization of great business intelligence that offer large data storage, accurate processing while analyzing processed information that was not tapped traditionally in data warehouse applications. In addition, big data is defined as high volume, velocity and variety as Gartner suggested. According to Gartner, the realization was probably not seen due to lack of intelligence database management technologies which is now trending at an alarming rate globally. Big data companies such Hadoop and Zettaset and IBM process and analytic this unstructured data into readable format for further analysis.
Technology advancement has seen increased use of intelligence and interactive applications with real time data generating programs thus increasing the need to large storage servers. For instance, social media such as Facebook store large volume of data with about two billions users accounts connecting globally thanks to reduced bandwidth access. The company should therefore adopt the big data concepts which stores, processes and analyzes data used to track client’s daily needs and on the other hand to increase it annual revenue gains.
Importance of big data in business and role played by MIS
As seen in paper, the amount of data in the world has been increasing on daily basis. The concept of big data can be divided into distinct categories such as Volume, which has been changing with amount of data produced and stored in various business and social application. According to Eaton et al (2011), the volume started in terabytes, petabytes and eventually Exabyte’s. The amount of data being created in these applications has been a challenge in IT systems where storage and security of data has been struggle while ensuring faster access of it when needed for decision making. Moreover Big data is also about Variety-this takes different data types that need to be considered in emails, Data logs and credit cards respectively. And lastly it is also velocity which means speed at which the data moves from processing and into storage.
Over the past years, Big data concepts has gained popularity in competitive business world. This has seen different reports describing how the concepts have influenced the way businesses are run. It is projected that large data analyticform the key to competition and success in business advancement. This will be driving force to success of doing business and thus every business manager should be fighting to have an edge in big data implementation. With increasing data volume produced by social media, weather metrology and mobile apps plays a major role in big data growth.
There are several reputable companies that offer big data technologies in world. They have invested lots of resources to train expertise in the big data field which has promising business in future.
Use of Data has been absorbed in every business functions and thus there is need to analyze for critical decision making. According to experts Big data analysis form an important factor in production and business management. This is fact that business managers analyze stored data for decision making. It is estimated that in year 2020 every functional business structure will have embraced big data concepts producing nearly 100 petabytes of data.
In today’s business world, big data analytic can unlock significance business competitive advantage. In this regards, data stored is business application such weather department and social media has been used to make important decisions especially for traveling agency using weather forecast to schedule their flight. It is therefore important for any reputable business to harness the hype of big data which bring a new innovation of doing daily errands by making information transparent and readily accessible (velocity) whenever needed. Due to the fact the big data stores digital data formats it is easily accessible for accurate processing.
Companies offering Big data services
In past, the largest companies dealing with big data were weather and scientific communities where they used supercomputing technologies to store and analyze data for critical decision making. This involved analysis of large volume of weather reports in different parts of then world. Though the departments used large volume of data, latest technology has brought in speed and wide variety of data types. This has seen, more advanced data analyzes where big data characteristic includes high storage volume, high access speed and more data type varieties. The largest data consumers sources includes sensor, social networking with thousand of active blogs and active accounts. For instance, social media Facebook announced to have reached 850 millions active users in the end of 2012. The 850 million active users produce on average 200 millions Facebook comments per day translating to an average of 20 terabyte data volume in a single day. The social media hold the largest data volume ranging from news, multimedia and blog posts.Though not all of the information in Facebook databases is useful for enterprises, it can be integrated several intelligence programs.
On the other hand, transactional data has also embraced big data where speeds and volume should be considered. The recent released analyses on transactional big data companies, it was estimated to produce and analyze on average 90 terabytes of stored data. Amazon and walmat retailer companies are said to hold more one millions online transactions and the information is stored in a secure database of large storage volume. It is therefore pose a challenging task for IT specialists to manage and analyze the data for decision making.
Leading big data companies such as IBM are using data collection and analysis to conducts research of data for effective decision making. This is also essential in customer satisfaction as the company uses the data in designing the products that suits their needs. The keys is that big data analysis is used to make informed decision making and production of customized products thus attracting a huge market share. To avoid challenges that may arise from big data analysis there should be clear policies such as security, privacy and liability which difficult in large volume of data. Moreover, skilled personnel with deep analytical skills should be trained to use data for effective decision making. Liebowitz (2013), with increasing data production and technology advancements requires the big data companies to set aside fund and incentives to acquire latest technologies to optimize effective use of data. In this regards, data integration from various sources for making informed decisions.
Hadoop and IBM big data companies offer open source framework services in big data. Over the past year, the companies have gained popularity as they offer applications supporting large volume data analysis using computing notes. They enable processing of unstructured data in business applications which hold about 80% and would not be realized using traditional technologies databases.Liebowitz (2013).Hadoop systems is divided into three subprojects: mapreduce,HDF and utility layer. To start with, MapReduce provide frameworks to end-user for connection as they assign nodes. It first maps the inputs in the nodes before splitting the workload into smaller data sets. HDFS on the other hand provides data storage platforms by spanning nodes. To avoid data lose the HDFS replicates data across different nodes.
The companies allow parallel processing of unstructured data and would run on inexpensive servers thus cost effective compared to traditional RDMS. The services are scalable in that nodes are added without compromising data formats. As seen they are intended to supplement previously used technologies by reducing the complexities and cost for analyzing critical used data for making informed decisions as Asthana (2011) suggest. They offer flexible data storage due to fact that no schema for data types. In this regards, data types stored can be integrated from different sources for deep analysis for making informed choices. The big data companies targets the advertising companies, social media networks and large weather metrology which frequently produce and consumer large data to their large clientele.
References
Asthana (2011) Big Data and Little Data, Forbes Magazine at Forbes.com, http://www.forbes.com/sites/dell/2013/4/3/big-data-and-little-data/
Eaton C, Paul, Zikopoulos IBM (2011). Understanding Big data: Analytcis for enterprise class hadoop and streaming data. McGraw Hill Professional
Liebowitz J (2013). Big data and business analytics .Auerbach Publishers, Incorporated
Radar O (2011). Big Data now: O'Reilly Media, Inc
