Wikibon’s newest analyst sees dramatic shifts happening in the way organizations are looking at data, and that will lead to major changes in platforms, skill requirements and the way business is done.

George Gilbert joins Wikibon as lead Big Data and Analytics analyst after six years on GigaOm Research’s coverage team of those areas. With a background in both technology marketing and financial analysis, he understands how tech companies and their IT customers think. He believes  the impending revolution in data management will transform industries and the ways in which companies source, make and deliver goods and services.

In an interview with SiliconANGLE founder John Furrier at the Informatica World 2015 conference this week, Gilbert painted a picture of a future in which organizations will use data from a great many more sources and for completely different purposes than they do today. Until recently, data processing was about making business processes more efficient, he said. New applications, however, “are about  making ever more intelligent decisions, such as engaging customers in order to anticipate and influence what they’re going to do.” Instead of just analyzing historical data, companies will increasingly want to interpret data in real time.

A seismic shift

And that’s a seismic shift. Data has traditionally been used for internal purposes by businesses seeking to achieve operational parity with each other in their business processes, Gilbert said, but the next wave of Big Data applications will be far more strategic.

Not only will businesses have much richer profiles of customers, but they’ll be able to combine it in real time with operational data to make better decisions.  For example, a bank’s trading department might be able to track risk exposure for each security and also the risk it takes on with each customer.  Combining that risk data in real-time can make for better pricing decisions, for example.

In the process, traditional lines between operational and analytical data will be erased. “Databases will no longer have to make a trade-off between fast and big,” Gilbert said. “Databases that do predictive modeling in the background overnight and the ones that stream data immediately may merge.”

This will require a very different approach to gathering and using data, he noted. “What these new applications all have in common is a new data layer with many more types of databases and the glue to tie all these things together.”

It’s still anybody’s guess who will provide the engines and the integration layer for an analytics-driven future. Some of the companies that are now innovating in Big Data on a massive scale, such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, are mostly focused on running their own internal applications rather than building platforms for mainstream enterprises.  And few enterprises have the technical wherewithal  to match the resources those born-on-the-Web companies bring to the task; rather, “they need someone like a Microsoft or an Amazon or a Google to put these platforms together.” Once enterprises can build on platforms like these, Gilbert said, they will be able to do the kind of data processing that the Web giants are doing today. As a result, “We’ll see an explosion of these new types of apps.”

Future applications will be more vertically focused and company-specific and will combine data from many internal and external sources. Gilbert foresees the evolution of marketplaces in which data owners will buy and sell information in the same way they swap parts and services today. “Fifteen years ago B2B marketplaces emerged in which companies would organize sort of a hub for many buyers and many sellers,” he said. “That might emerge as a model for some of these applications in the future.” Entire new platforms could emerge in the process.

Noting that he and Gilbert were meeting at a conference sponsored by a data integration company, Furrier said an important gap still needs to be filled in making data transfer and integration seamless. “Whoever can provide frictionless data transfer will be the engagement solution platform, and that’s a zillion-dollar market,” Furrier said.