Putting Big Data to Work: Opportunities for Enterprises

Table of Contents

  1. Summary
  2. About Brett Sheppard
  3. Defining Big Data
    1. Volume
    2. Complexity
    3. Speed
  4. Empowerment of Business and Public-Sector Value
    1. Improve Operational Efficiency
    2. Grow Revenues
    3. Empower “Blue Ocean” New Business Models
    4. Big Data Limitations
  5. Big Data by Industry
    1. Financial Services
    2. Health Care
    3. Sports
    4. Travel
    5. Web 2.0: Consumer, Retail and Media
  6. Big Data Technologies
    1. Open-Source Options: Hadoop and More
    2. In-database Analytics
    3. Visualization
    4. Collaboration: Friending Your Big Data
  7. Key Takeaways
  8. Further Reading

1. Summary

Business and IT leaders now face significant opportunities and challenges with big data. This is true across numerous industries, from health care and finance to travel booking sites and even sports.

In 2011, we’re seeing extraordinary growth of big data in these areas along three dimensions: volume, complexity and speed. Additionally, data science is contributing significantly to operational efficiencies in these sectors as well as enabling more sales growth and even brand-new business models.

This report, published in conjunction with the GigaOM Structure Big Data 2011 conference, explores the rapidly evolving big data business and technology ecosystem. It examines big data in the context of several different industries: financial services, health care, sports, travel and media. We explore the different big data technologies — from Hadoop and in-data analytics to cloud-based collaboration tools — and their various benefits for enterprises. And we examine some of the existing challenges big data poses, and what enterprise IT leaders can do to overcome them.

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