The term “big data” may have lost favor in recent years, but its byproducts have quietly been cultivating a revival.Throughmainstreamfascination(and fear) of machine intelligence, that swamp of stockpiled data is finally finding its footing in the business world. Now,eight years after SiliconANGLE’s first coverage of a dedicated big data event, the excitement for data’s over-hyped potential is returning.
Broadcasting live from Silicon Valley, theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s roving news desk, celebrates Big Data Week with a two-day event,BigData SV. With exclusive commentary and a special report from SiliconANGLE Media-owned research group Wikibon, this week’s coverage reflects on nearly a decade of big data successes, failures and points of cultural evolution. Kicking off the event is theCUBE host Dave Vellante (@dvellante, pictured, left), who sits down with Wikibon analysts Peter Burris (@plburris, pictured, center) and George Gilbert (@ggilbert41, pictured, right). The trio discussed the latest trends in the big data market, noting the historical developments enabling big data’s current revival.
“The most important trend we’re seeing is that users are starting to drive what’s happening in the big data universe,” Burris said. After years of experimentation, big data has worked out enough kinks to deliver user-friendly software applications that require less expertise at the infrastructure level, and Burris expects the enterprise will restructure itself to serve both the software and the hardware needs of democratized data services.
This market maturity is crucial to big data’s role in the larger trend toward digital transformations. Having been disrupted by big data’s biggest practitioners, companies likeAmazon.com Inc. and Netflix Inc. areforcing entire industriesto better employ data analyticsat the heart of their business models. This demand has sustained interest in big data deployments despite an85 percent failure rate,according to some estimates, as insights drawn from massive data pools comprise the most important aspect of a successful digital transformation.
“The whole concept of the digital transformation starts with data,” Burris said. “Our view at Wikibon is [that] a digital business uses data as an asset. That core concept of using data differently is essential because big data is the process by which you create business value out of data.”
From this perspective, Burris sees the big data market as having a pretty normal adoption process.
