UPDATED 15:45 EDT / FEBRUARY 27 2013

NEWS

Speed will be the Main Competitive Advantage in Big Data, Says Steve Kenniston

Storage alchemist Steve Kenniston discussed Big Data trends, announcements and issues in theCube, live from Strata 2013. He explained that “data management of big data will be crucial to IT,” as well extracting value from the data collected.

Conversations at Strata 2013 are more and more about capabilities of Big Data technology. While the hardware is important, it is the software that adds value and software applications in Big Data are taking up more of the attention of the industry. At the end of the day, “I want to spend my money on the valuable stuff and that ends up being the software,” Kenniston explained, talking about what interests clients.

As focus shifts from hardware to software, Kenniston discussed about what companies need to do to thrive and adapt to margins that are not what they have been used to. While everybody talks about the commodization of data and software, the same is true for hardware. Hardware is still important, as this is where most applications are deployed, yes companies need to get the margins from software, while hardware margins are diminishing.

Steve Kenniston, talking about data storage and tape as a cheap and reliable storage medium, also said that “all flash arrays are the next big thing,” as they will prove to be much less expensive when trying to drive big data, compared to spinning disk arrays, for example.

The Storage Alchemist explained that when it comes to what customers are looking for, they usually don’t want to deal with the integration components. Consumers are looking for performance. “When it comes to this big data thing, speed is going to end up being your competitive advantage.” Companies will increasingly look for ways to get to insights that allow them to make a decision sooner.

Kenniston also mentioned Big Data aspects that are not really discussed although they should be. A big issues is how small and medium companies can take advantage of Big Data, how they can adopt the concept and utilize it to get valuable insights. Big Data actually helps smaller players compete. Small banks, for example, can now compete about bigger financial entities because they can gain a better understanding of their business and their customers.

He stated an important issue to hear about would be what a company can do on a 150,000 USD budget to get a hardware integration, in other words, bringing Big Data to SMBs.

Asked to explain his previous statement regarding marketers in big organizations being afraid of Big Data, Kenniston said that the issue is with who gathers the data. Quoting Accenture research, data gathering is driven by the IT departments. That is why massive amounts of data are handed to marketers, but they are not the ones asking the questions, therefore they get answers that they don’t really know how to use, so they ignore Big Data. Marketers need to find a way to ask the right questions to get the insight they need.

Kenniston also believes that startups and SMBs know better what to ask, they know what data sets to collect when compared to big companies.


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