Maturity Model: Big Data involves the five major areas

According to IDC analysts, there are few popular terms such as Big Data that get so much speculation that, despite the hype, we now see real-world success stories and businesses are already starting to make big data Strategy developed.

"We are still seeing a lot of speculation and a lot of promises," said Dan Vesset, an IDC analyst. "The question is what the reality is and what should the company do in the near term and in the short term?"

"We can install a variety of technologies, but it's important to harness big data to improve the decision-making process," Vesset said. "You can deploy the world's largest Hadoop, but that's not enough."

IDC analyst Michael Versace said Progressive, one of the companies that used big data projects to transform its business, used the details of the customer's driving habits to create a usage-based model to determine the price policy. The company collects data through devices that drivers plug into diagnostic ports on cars that track how often customers brake, drive at night and other dangerous driving habits.

At the same time, they face many challenges for organizations that want to successfully deploy big data projects: what business data should be stored, what should be dropped, the cost of getting the technology they need, and the lack of IT with the necessary skills professional. Versace said that in the near future, the last issue may become more serious.

There are some misconceptions about big data. For example, this does not mean social media entirely. Others think it's entirely about clickstream analysis. And, Hadoop is not the only solution, because it is mainly for high-volume processing, rather than real-time monitoring. IDC estimates that about 10% to 12% of businesses in North America are using Hadoop in some form.

IDC created a "maturity model" for big data that covers five areas: data, people, processes, technology, and intent.

The first step an organization can start in big data projects is to explore opportunities to leverage its existing technologies and data in new ways, assess public clouds and open source options, and begin experimenting with proof of concept and prototypes. Over the next year or two, these companies should capitalize on the initial success of big data projects to raise money for larger projects.

IDC analyst David Schubmehl said 80% of what is considered big data is unstructured or semi-structured information. This diversity of data will require unified information access technology to deal with, such as Oracle's Endeca and IBM's Vivisimo and so on.

Big data challenges will continue to affect the database industry, and technologies such as graphics and in-memory database platforms are increasingly important. In addition, traditional relational databases will also change.