The very term “Big Data” implies that a company’s prospects for monetizing data can be measured in terabytes and petabytes. The thinking among many is that magnitude of data automatically translates to data value. However, some folks working directly with companies on their Big Data initiatives tell a different story. They say it’s not the size of the data in the fight, but the size of the fight in the data.

Paul Sonderegger, Big Data Strategist at Oracle, said there are a number of misconceptions about Big Data going around. “Contrary to popular wisdom, data is not abundant,” he told Dave Vellante (@dvellante), host of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team.

He explained that it is in fact quite difficult to locate a dataset’s “twin” — in fact it probably doesn’t exist. “Data consists of countless unique observations. And one of the issues here is that two pieces of data are usually not fungible — you can’t replace one with the other, because they carry different information, they carry different semantics,” he said.

Soneregger said that the relevance and profit-driving potential of these “observations” are the real currency in data — not bytes.

Balancing the Big Data equation

Soneregger said that there are areas where bundling and layering data into larger sets can add value. One is in resubmitting an algorithm’s results into the algorithm, creating a feedback loop, which makes the algorithm smarter with each submission. He spoke about a financial company that does this with its fraud detection on electronic funds transfers.

He said that tying together different datasets in unique ways and analyzing them can also give companies insights that competitors don’t have.  “Companies should really look outside their four walls,” he said.

Specifically, interaction with customers generates some of the most valuable data. Feeding that into algorithms and re-feeding the results “gives you a competitive flywheel that is very hard to catch,” he added.

Watch the complete video interview with Paul Sonderegger below:

Photo by SiliconANGLE