While many of my colleagues were at Strata last week (see our coverage here), I was at IBM PartnerWorld. As someone who spends a lot of time covering cutting edge technology, PartnerWorld was a sobering reminder that most companies have yet to adopt the cloud and don’t even know what big data really means. Strata represents the future, but PartnerWorld is the present, where companies are still struggling to determine how new technologies fit into their businesses.

I spend a lot of time reading about large enterprises doing cutting edge things with analytics. Target recently made the news by figuring out that a teenager was pregnant before her father did. I recently covered how analytics is being used in health care and in the process uncovered some ways that the Internet of Things is already being used to help patients. IBM presented a great example of how its partner BrightStar built a Cognos-based solution Cincinnati Zoo that provided near real-time analytics to employees’ mobile devices.

But what is every day reality for many of the companies at an event like Strata is still science fiction to most companies. Most IT departments are just concerned with “keeping the lights on,” to use a phrase I heard often at the conference.

In advance of the event The VAR Guy questioned whether big data was a real opportunity for IBM partners focused on SMBs:

Business Analytics projects typically involve midsize to large companies and big price tags. That’s great for scores of IBM partners. But it’s not exactly a big, broad opportunity for hundreds — or even thousands — of smaller IBM VARs and resellers that are far more familiar with traditional SMB server, email and CRM projects.

During a panel on big data in small business IBM did its best to make the case to press and analysts that small business is indeed relevant to small and midsized companies. The refrain from IBM’s spokespeople was that SMB customers that are afraid of big data “need help from the partner community.” But this line was met with skepticism.

IBM is interested in pushing the latest technology and services, but it’s not clear that IBM’s partners are ready. Not every company is ready to start moving data and applications into the public cloud. And those that are often don’t have the time and resources to refactor applications for cloud use, or even to evaluate cloud providers and options. The IT teams are just too busy trying to keep the existing systems up and running. This is especially true of midmarket customers.

This is a classic IT problem – keeping the Exchange server up or trouble shooting the ERP system keeps IT from being able to focus on strategic improvements. “Big data” is a confusing buzz word that many IT managers just think is going to put more work on their plates.

But Andy Monshaw, General Manager of IBM’s MidMarket Business, says that SMBs are interested in big data. “Most people would say ‘big data and small business? No way!'” he told me. But he says that IBM Netezza’s sales frequency of sales are highest in the SMB market. Netezza is a data warehousing and analytics solution that IBM acquired in 2010 for $1.7 billion. It’s sold as an appliance at relatively low costs.

Monshaw explains that IBM meets with potential Netezza customers to determine their needs. Then, working from a set of templates, can build a proof of concept for the customer in only a day or so. Once the customer signs on and gives IBM’s consultants real data to start feeding into Netezza the whole system can be online in a matter

ServicesAngle

The term “big data” is a nice way to distinguish the challenges and possibilities of analyzing unstructured data in volumes that were previously thought either impossible or prohibitively expensive, but I can see why it would such a scary term for an SMB that’s just trying to get by. For the most part what most people are really talking about is business analytics, which has been around for a long time. Big data doesn’t have to be scary if its tied to concepts and processes that businesses already know. EMC’s CTO of EIM Services Bill Schmarzo talked at Strata about the value that data science can have for traditional business intelligence. Bringing big data and data science to business intelligence will likely be the way to go for smaller organizations.

Meanwhile, IT teams can get started with big data within their own department with tools like Splunk or Netuitive, which are designed to leverage analytics to make IT’s life easier.

My big question at this point is not whether SMBs can benefit from big data – I think they most clearly can – but what the ramifications of using a custom built black box are in terms of vendor lock-in and commoditization of strategy. I’ll address those issues in a future post.

Your Angle

Is big data valuable to small companies? If so, how can smaller organizations take advantage of large-scale analytics without breaking the bank on highly paid data scientists? Leave us a comment and let us know what you think.