Big data is still in the strategy planning stage in most industries according to Tom Roloff, COO for EMC Consulting. But, he said in an interview in The SiliconAngle Cube from EMCworld 2012, companies are moving aggressively, and often fear is as much a motivator as business opportunity (see full video below).

“Everybody is worrying about ‘Are my competitors in my industry learning something that I’m not?’” he says. “There’s an element of ‘Can you tell me what other people in financial services are doing with big data because if they’re doing something I should be doing, I’d better find out about it quick.’”

Big data discussions with customers are almost always involve LOB management and the CIO in large enterprises. And they are vertical-industry centric since each vertical has its own set of business problems. As a result, about half of EMC’s consultants come out of a specific vertical industry, know the business issues of that industry, and only talk to business leaders in that vertical, and EMC Global Consulting is organized by vertical industries rather than territories. The other half are technology consultants that are horizontal and join the engagement after the initial business planning is finished.

Also, despite common belief, most of the business issues EMC consults on are not new problems. “So if you’re talking to a telco and the problem is customer churn, that’s been a problem with telcos forever. Or when a bank officer says, ‘I don’t know if the John Smith who has a brokerage account, the John Smith who has a bank account, and the John Smith who has a wealth management account is the same John Smith or three different John Smiths’, that’s been a problem in banking forever.”

Nor is data analysis a new idea for these industries. The telcos, for instance, have been analyzing their customer data almost since the days of Alexander Graham Bell.

What big data does is allow companies to expand the data set being analyzed far beyond just the rows and columns in their structured databases to include unstructured data inside the company and outside in the cloud, he said. “Now you can bring all that information together. It’s a massive amount of information. Then how do I get some insight out of all that information? Now it’s a technology problem. So these engagements merge business and technology problems.”

Mobile Computing

Big data is not the only major area of transformation concerning companies today. Mobile computing is another. “In banking in particular, huge amounts of effort are being spent right now on ‘How do I render information to users in the way they want to consume it, and how do I design a user interface and a way to interact with all that information in the right way.’”

So for instance he said EMC Consulting is working with a large credit card company on designing an e-wallet. The application is not challenging, “but ultimately we have to create the user interface for the iPhone, the iPad, etc., that you and I will ultimately be carrying around. There’s a strong conversation about what the user experience will be like and how we will enable the mobile worker.”

Cloud Computing

Global consulting is also excited about the opportunity in cloud development. This has three components, he said: people, process, and technology. Most companies are past the planning stage now and are implementing, which is a huge change from two years ago, when very few large industry CIOs even thought cloud was real – almost all those he talked to said it was all hype. “When I asked the 70 CIOs at our CIO Connect Event Monday who did not have a private cloud strategy, nobody raised their hand.”

And in the last year, the trend has shifted from private to hybrid cloud. In the annual Wikibon IT Transformation Survey,  just completed, for instance, 37% of respondents indicated that they were building hybrid clouds, a huge jump from a year ago when only about 9% were considering hybrid.

Gartner has just published a report saying that by 2016, 50% of large corporate data, even in regulated industries, will be sitting in a public cloud, he said. “You say that to people today, and they say, ‘No way!’ But I think four years is way too long. I think it’s happening right now.”