BIG DATA & ADVANCED ANALYTICS

Once you’re confident in the stability, strength and reliability of your data warehouse, have some business intelligence and data visualisation tools up and running and have been through the ‘user adoption’ journey and all is humming along, it’s time to get fancy!

Historically, data has been neatly organised into rows and columns – very easily categoriesed and interrelated with other columns and metrics to draw meaningful insights from business activities and business data.

With the understanding that now data is flowing around us each second in places like social media, geo-tracking, online movement and tracking of consumers, phone usage, social activity (and that’s just to name a few); the game has well and truly changed…

The key elements in understanding big data are down to the three V’s; 

Volume, Velocity and Variety.

We’re talking big. For some organizations, this might be tens of terabytes of data, for others, it may be hundreds of petabytes. The key here is this data is all very unstructured and low-density. It doesn’t fit neatly into column a, b or c; ie data from twitter feeds, mobile apps or even geo-tracking or monitoring equipment.

Given the mass quantities of information coming in from all angles, the requirement to process quickly is an understatement. Remember our recommendation to build a strong foundation? This is why. Most users will require real-time or near real-time speeds to process this data and be able to action decision making at scale and speed – two steps ahead of their competitors.

As above; the sources feeding into a big data solution are vast and varied. Some include text, voice, video, metric relational data which track patterns and movement as examples. The variety also adds complication as computers like to understand how metric A relates to metric B and how AB relates to C… this can pose a tricky problem when there are huge amounts flowing in and not always an easy correlation between metrics.

The great news is we have some passionate Data Scientists who can see past the three V’s and make sense of it this raw power using statistical modelling, machine learning and advanced analytic strategies.

The Outcome? Some seriously cool (sometimes creepy – we’ll admit!), laser-focused, highly accurate and real-time visuals of your business, your customers and your future!