The economy consists of different sectors that either provide, distribute or consume the goods. All of these components are needed to maintain the balance. If one of these sectors becomes crippled, the economy would collapse.

The same principle goes for Big Data, which is expected to rake in $50 billion in revenue by 2017. Big Data is growing considerably and has given birth to a new innovation dubbed as the Data Economy.

“This innovation [will] continue to manifest itself in a number of ways,” Wikibon Senior Analyst Jeffrey Kelly stated. “In some cases, enterprises are leveraging the flexibility made possible by new data processing and analysis technologies to improve existing business processes, resulting in higher worker productivity and more efficient operations.

“In other cases, enterprises are fundamentally reinventing themselves and entire markets by creating new data-driven business models in which the analysis and dissemination of data is itself the product.”

Different industries have been leveraging Big Data such as healthcare, banking and finance, and governments. Many others are following their steps.

Atlanta-based L2C is helping financial services businesses assess credit risks. It calculates credit risks based on a number of non-traditional data sources; this allows people with little or no credit history to potentially qualify for mortgages or loans. This could help drive home sales, boost other businesses by driving new home construction, or other possibilities that wouldn’t happen if people weren’t given a chance. In short, what L2C is doing is giving people the opportunity to improve their lives, even if they have a low or no credit history.

Hindrances in Big Data’s Path

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Still, even if Big Data is progressing, there are some hindrances in its path, especially when it comes to the business world. Kelly stated that one of the major reasons Big Data has failed to meet the expectations of businesses is because traditional business intelligence applications require IT to pull together data models and curate data sources for the data to be usable.

But he did mention that times are slowly changing, since there are now companies offering products that help businesses to get the most of out of data collected without hiring a whole IT team. Some of these companies include Tableau Software, QlikTech and Hadoop-focused vendors such as Platfora and Datameer. The only problems, he said, are finding people willing to go through training to be able to use these products efficiently or if the IT team prevents companies from adopting these self-service business intelligence products.

• The open source debate

Aside from that, there are still some areas in Big Data that need to be ironed out in order for it to be truly successful. Right now, there’s an ongoing debate about whether or not data infrastructure software should be free and open, with revenue generated solely from services or by selling proprietary software built on top of an open core. Both sides have both pros and cons.

Proponents of the open-source approach argue that it will be able to take advantage of community innovations across all aspects of product development, that it’s easier to get customers especially if they offer fully-functioning software for free. Plus, they say it is easier to get established partners that could easily open up market opportunities.

Unfortunately, the fully open-source approach has some major drawbacks. For example, the open-source community is often not united, making progress slower. This affects the long-term future of the product and revenue; plus, businesses that offer only services are harder to scale.

As for the open core approach, though it has the potential to create value differentiation faster than the open source community, experts say it can easily lose its value when the open-source community catches up in terms of functionality.

When vendors take the open core approach, this decision allows them to maintain some level of credibility in the open source community. At the same time, however, they can also be seen as taking advantage of the open-source community.

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