Connected devices and expanded cloud storage have empowered the compounding creation of data faster than ever before.  The substantial explosion of data and information from smart devices, social networks, and all other solutions connected to internet weigh the potential of Big Data.  And to take full advantage of big data approach, IT needs to re-architect its strategy.  IT will need to construct a new way of capturing, unifying and analyzing data. What’s needed are well-structured systems that can handle massive amounts of data, contain built-in logging and maintaining, and allowing data to keep accumulating.

According to the IBM Business Analytics and Optimization for the Intelligent Enterprise study, businesses take on decisions without understanding and evaluating their data information. The report also reveals, with finance efficiency and a mature business analytics and optimization approach, companies can gain 20 times more profit growth and a 30% higher return. The study emphasizes the importance and opportunity of data analytics for IT. Sanjay Mirchandani, chief information officer at EMC also shares the same opinion, “The onus on IT is to leverage data.” EMC is building its internal big data technical expertise to provide affordable IT solution and to evaluate different approach to data analytics.

Sticking to Data Analytics, Informatica introduced the Informatica Fast Clone this week, the data replication solution, to support big data transaction and operational data needs.

The company said, “While Informatica Fast Clone automates the cloning of application data, Informatica Data Replication manages the capture, routing and delivery of high-volume transaction data across diverse systems in real time with minimal source system impact.”

Earlier last month Informatica released Informatica 9.1, designed to help customers monetize their social media and transactional history data.  Informatica 9.1 works with Hadoop MapReduce tool and supports data warehousing systems by Oracle, IBM, EMC and others.

Informatica Data Integration senior vice-president and general manager Sachin Chawla said, “Combined with our existing Cloud Replication, PowerCenter Real Time and PowerExchange Change Data Capture (CDC) products, our Universal Data Replication capabilities offer our customers more choice to fit their needs that range from replication with sophisticated transformation to fast bulk replication.

“Virtually all organizations consider business continuity and improved operational reporting to be highly important and we are now better armed to support those initiatives.”

The company is adding high speed replication and cloning of big data analytics devices, including EMC Greenplum, HP Vertica, IBM Netezza and Teradata. IBM Netezza provides advanced analytics technology of its own in the form of SPSS supporting up to ten petabytes of data.

Let’s see some of the example that is benefiting businesses, governments and companies driven by big data solution over the traditional approach:

The Square Kilometer Array (SKA) is expected to hit the floor by 2016. Once ready, it will be the world’s most powerful telescope compelled by a big data approach. It will comprise of exabyte-scale computing to process the huge data sets that will be captured.  Richard Armstrong, one of the researchers working on the project, said “SKA is an instrument that will continuously produce data. There is no way to store this amount of information so we need to process data in real time.”

Microsoft and Oracle are providing in-application data based solution to users through role based dashboard, while Salesforce.com’s chatter app makes real time update and changes as per user request and provides that to user.

Then there’s Watson, the IBM supercomputer that reached superstar status on the game show Jeopardy.  Watson uses a cluster of 90 IBM Power 750 servers, each with 32 processors, a total of 2880 cores, to access and process the information in real time. Each server is powered with 500Gbytes of RAM and is connected together using a 10Gbps network. The system uses the open source Hadoop solution for big data management.

In terms of analyzing big data, Apache Hadoop has been widely used by enterprises for big data management these days. According to a survey from Ventana Research, about 54% of organizations are using or considering Hadoop for managing big data for their business.

Proper management and execution of big data can result in a positive ROI and competitive diversity among a crowded market. Big data is all about generating, analyzing, and dealing large data sets and proper decisions would provide opportunities for organizations to leverage big data today for better business initiatives tomorrow.