Big data is new oil who picked the first barrel?

Winter San Jose, still comfortable, the sun shines on the face warm, peaceful. Double Tree Hotel Conference hall, an interesting topic is being hotly discussed: "Big data is so omnipotent, so why am I still single?" ”

In recent years, more and more people have been chasing the following sentence: "We must believe in the data except God." "Big Data" with its unique mass, diversity, high value and other characteristics obsessed with many areas of people, it seems that it can solve all problems.

At the moment, the girl's problem has intrigued the American storage and network leader LSI engineers. Bob Quinn first spoke: "This may be because your data is problematic." But then, Bob realised that through data analysis and mining, it could actually give a more professional, effective solution, like LSI's day-to-day business for its customers-managing massive amounts of data efficiently, while achieving maximum performance and efficiency in the datacenter.

Bob is vice president and chief technical expert of LSI Enterprise Strategy Office. Bob's plan is to retrieve the world's single men's database, quantify the characteristics of love, and finally come to an ideal outcome. "The data architecture needs to change, originally a single server locking a single target, and now multiple servers tracking multiple targets." "That is, effective management and analysis of massive data."

The cool thing is that the filtering process can be done instantaneously. "When you go into a bar and see a nice person, analytics tools will help you analyze your DNA and his DNA for a second, and conclude that your child will be able to enter the world's top universities or become a drug dealer." "said Bob. This process pursues the highest performance and efficiency of the data.

Does that sound cool? In fact, this is only a simple application of large data. As data analysis, storage, and management penetrate into more industries and sectors, the value of large data will be beyond imagination, from leading Internet applications to relatively traditional areas such as banking, telecommunications, insurance, and transportation.

Big data is not far away or mysterious. With the joint efforts of the IT infrastructure service provider and the application manufacturer, it will one day be a part of our daily life like water, electricity and coal.

Business model remains a mystery

Say and "Data" era, the big data in the end to what extent?

Consulting agencies such as McKinsey and IDC have published a series of stunning statistical reports. Data from the mobile Internet era have shown rapid growth, with data generated over the past 3 years more than in the past 40,000 years.

Data from generation to consumption, time window is very small. Every second, people send out 2.9 million emails, and every minute people upload 60 hours of video to YouTube, and every day, people send 4 billion messages on Facebook.

But all this simply shows that big data has the basis of a massive explosion, as rich as an oil treasure buried for thousands of years, and that it is another thing that can be exploited and exploited like oil.

At present, large data in daily life has begun to apply. For example: Alibaba, Amazon and other e-commerce sites from the user's previous browsing, purchase behavior mining potential needs; Google's 1 billion-dollar acquisition of Israeli map company Waze tells users which route is best based on real-time information.

However, Abhi Talwalkar, president and chief executive of LSI, said in an interview with the 21st Century Economic Report: "The big data is still in its early stages, and it's still a long way from mass commercialization or profitability." ”

At present, large data collection is still mainly structured data, and the value of unstructured data is far from being excavated. According to statistics, 10% of the structured data stored in the database, and 90% of unstructured data, closely related to human information, such as: Mail, video, microblogging, location information, link information.

Bob told the 21st Century economics reporter that at the moment, the big data value has two main aspects: one is the value of advertising data, such as Google, Facebook, which is often called "Madison Avenue." At present, about 80% of the data business value is related to the advertising business. The other is the commercial value of extracting information from the data, which is relatively small in scale.

"But over the next decade, advertising will be the least valuable part of big data profitability." "Bob thought.

Take the Chinese market as an example, at present, Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent three internet giants the conversion value of the traffic is different. Baidu and Ali of each PV conversion is almost five cents, and Tencent less than a penny. This is behind the search engine and E-commerce generated by the value of advertising is higher than the value of the network browsing data.

However, this phenomenon may soon be overturned. "When two sets of different data, one is directly related to money transaction data, one is the data of life form, the two combine each other to reflect the full picture of personal or life, the commercial value that it erupts will be another scene." "said Bob.

Unfortunately, the banking, telecommunications, insurance and other industries, a large number of transaction data and information, are still in hibernation or semi dormant state, commercial value is seriously ignored, underestimated. Life, entertainment and other unstructured data value mining, but also only the initial stage.

However, no one knows the exact answer to what the business model of large data based on unstructured is. This remains a mystery that remains to be solved.

Storage Revolution and opportunity

Large-data business development is only the tip of the iceberg, but the resulting storage and computing revolution is in the offing.

Huge amounts of data present new challenges to storage infrastructure. Richardson, executive vice president and chief operating officer of LSI Company, told the 21st century economic reporter, "future mobile smart devices themselves will not be able to complete all storage and computing power, but must be sent to the data center." The ability to store and compute data centers becomes very important in the process. ”

Storage System in large data age requires a certain level of scalability, and must be simple. "Because of its sheer size, data center operators pay special attention to maximizing their IT investments while reducing operating costs and space requirements," said Tom Swinford, LSI Senior vice president and managing director of Data center solutions. ”

In addition, the real-time processing capabilities of large data must become very powerful. At present, various models of solid-state storage equipment emerged, small to simple in the server to do cache, large to full flash memory system to bring a big leap in storage.

More importantly, large data demands higher security, such as financial data, medical information, and government intelligence, which have their own security standards and confidentiality requirements.

"Data security is going to be tougher in the future," says Jeff. "When data does not exist on its own devices, but is stored remotely elsewhere, it is susceptible to insecurity." "LSI has made a series of efforts to enhance the security of the data. ”

For example, making network data management keys easier, allowing users to monitor data in real time on the network, and effective responses to data security threats. "Enables network vendors, service providers, and it vendors to enhance the security of the data through a layer of hardware, or more, of the solution." "Jeff said.

Of course, the new demands of the data revolution have given the IT infrastructure vendors a significant opportunity to leap. As data continues to grow, the competition is more intense as storage vendors adapt to new requirements by modifying traditional architectural designs.

At present, there are mainly IBM, EMC, LSI, Intel, HP and other IT infrastructure manufacturers in the field of exerting large data. In the Chinese market, IBM put forward the slogan of "Intelligent Analysis Insight"; EMC launched a new five-year plan in China this March, proposing a "10 times-fold increase in big data business" goals.

Jeff told the 21st century economics reporter that there are two big opportunities for LSI companies. First, mobile and other intelligent equipment growth brought about by the data center storage needs; The second is that the 4G era, Huawei, ZTE, Ericsson and other wireless network infrastructure companies to address the new demand for communications processing, which all provide LSI company with important development opportunities.

It is reported that the Nasdaq-listed LSI company has maintained an annual growth rate of 17% since 2009 until 2012. "With GDP growth in countries such as the United States and China in 2014, and increased IT spending, especially with 4G licensing Lte,lsi, the company expects upbeat growth next year," Abhi said. ”

How to grasp data opportunity?

Companies such as IBM, EMC and LSI, such as steel and cement in the construction industry, have built the most basic facilities for large data industrial parks, but how to build beautiful skyscrapers on this basis requires the joint efforts of application vendors and even traditional industry manufacturers.

November 22, at the sixth annual Accelerated Innovation Summit (AIS), many experts believe that "enterprises should develop an integrated IT strategy to deal with large data acquisition, integration and management." ”

First, the large data layout and implementation should be closely linked to the business strategy of the enterprise. Robert Ober, a senior expert at LSI's CTO office, told the 21st century economic reporter that, in the case of the financial industry, BofA, one of America's largest banking groups, had used the Hadoop (Distributed System architecture) cluster as a copy of the DataSet as early as two years ago in September, Migrate it to the Hadoop cluster in the application of traditional it architectures, so that they can run faster and more efficiently.

"The financial system has been very clear about the trends in big data, but it is still very conservative in its implementation," said an unnamed hedge fund industry source told the 21st century Economic report. However, with the "Internet finance" this year, the concept of the fiery, Alibaba, Beijing east, Tencent and other Internet companies to push the reform of the financial system, financial institutions are also embracing the challenges of greater change.

Secondly, we need to balance the interests of speed, cost and acceptability. Large data deployment requires high cost input, which is a heavy cost burden for most SMEs. As a result, industry experts predict that real large-scale applications of large data will be in the traditional areas of finance, telecommunications and logistics.

However, small and medium-sized enterprises need to strengthen the awareness of large data, the future enterprise organization structure management, no longer just set up the CEO, COO, CFO and other positions, will also have CDO (Chief Data Officer), CSO (Chief strategic officer) and other professionals, through efficient means of information cooperation, the development of the enterprise to plug the wisdom of the power of data.

As Amazon's former chief scientist, Andreas Weigend, said, "The data are new oil." "There is data to have competitive strength."

(Responsible editor: The good of the Legacy)