Second only to Google in digital ad revenue, Facebook is setting an example for the enterprise in leveraging web-based data sources to drive business value. Tim Campos, the social networking behemoth’s CIO, sat down with HP Software head George Kadifa at the manufacturer’s recent Discover event in Barcelona to tell attendees and theCUBE viewers how Vertica enables his team to manage information more effectively.

Data is Facebook’s most valuable asset and also its greater challenge, with more than a billion active users generating approximately 500 terabytes worth of social interactions every day. The company stores an excess of 200 petabytes in what Campos calls the world’s largest “database of relations” between brands and individuals.

“We have moved from the industrial age to the knowledge economy, and Facebook is a knowledge-based enterprise. So specifically what that means is that the core asset, the value of the company, are the thoughts and ideas that come from our workforce. And the lifeblood of a knowledge-based company is data,” Campos tells Kadifa.

The executive perceives analytics in terms of scale and speed, two factors that trade off against each even in Facebook’s cutting edge cloud environment. This Big Data catch 22 has in the past made it difficult for the company to keep track of its more than 100 ad revenue metrics, slowing query and forcing IT to dispose of financial information after 30 days. Campos details that since deploying Vertica, his firm has been able to hold onto financial data for a year while reducing the refresh cycle from 24 hours to just one. Additionally, users can now find in seconds what once took minutes to process. There’s a lesson here for CIOs, he highlights: harness Big Data to refocus from driving cost savings to boosting the bottom line.

“As CIOs and as IT organizations, we are heading into a really exciting time. The world is no longer about how can we just drive the costs out of IT; efficiency obviously is important, but we really need to be creating value for our firms. And what Big Data enables is the ability to create data assets that at the very least help drive the next generation of insights for our business, and in many cases can be products in and of themselves,” Campos says.

To achieve tangible returns on their analytics investments, organizations must identify their Big Data assets and make insights easily accessible to decision makers. Having the right corporate culture is also important, Campos notes: CIOs have to be passionate about their Big Data initiatives, while their C-level peers need to stay open to new ideas.

Watch the sit down right here