element61 can define & build your Big Data Architecture
Digitization, IoT and a boost in connectivity cause organizations to tackle a new challenges: the increase in data generation or the challenge to collect and use intelligently Big Data. We from element61 can work with you to set-up your Big Data Architecture including a real-time set-up, a Data Lake, your first predictive pipeline, etc.
What is Big Data vs. Business Intelligence?
As element61 we see a Big Data Platform as a complementary set-up to a traditional BI stack. Big Data technology that can help organizations handle bigger data volumes and simplify the delivery of intense or real-time analyses while avoiding skyrocketing storage and maintenance costs. Specific use-cases where Big Data architectures win & traditional BI Datawarehouses fail are web or app-tracking data, handling social media data in retail, network-log data in telecom or energy, connected devices such as monitoring tools in hospitals, Internet-Of-Things (IOT) or machines in a production process.
Figure: Big Data stored in your Big Data Architecture still requires BI tools for discovery & reporting
For years, organizations considered Big Data an IT solution rather than a business opportunity. That changed when disruptors such as Zalando, bol.com, Coolblue, Facebook, Amazon or Google leveraged Big Data to their distinctive advantage: they had a unique 360 view on their customers, a personalized approach to all users, an understanding of social media, etc. Although their success can't be claimed to only Big Data, their success was fueled by the ability to read, understand and use massive data-sources to take real-time decisions; after all: "what gets measured gets managed".
Today, the essence of Big Data is to keep and use all of your organizations data indefinitely, no matter the size or source. Its added-value is bringing together all of the data such that we can answer any type of question and the organization is empowered to make informed decisions.
Although this market is changing continuously for sure as an Open Source community (Apache), the past years have seen breakthroughs as the worlds most mature software providers such as Google, IBM, SAP and Microsoft are now offering a toolbox of solutions designed to abstract most-complex part of the technology and to guarantee integration with known BI solutions. Although all named different, most-needed Big Data modules return in all service offerings (Microsoft Azure, IBM , Google Cloud Platform). Solutions are offered with a choice of full-cloud, semi-cloud or on-premises.
What's Big Data?
The term of Big Data stands for the challenge (opportunity?) to collect, organize and analyze new types of data: i.e.,
- a bigger dataset (volume)
- a more varied dataset such as pictures or speech (variety)
- often combined with a faster data-requirement (velocity) and
- a higher importance of accuracy (veracity).
These terms the 4 Vs jointly coin the term Big Data.
What can element61 do?
As part of our end-to-end offering in Business Analytics, we offer at element61 the hands-on expertise ranging from building out a Big Data strategy to setting-up a Big Data production environment in parallel to your BI stack. element61 focused on PaaS & SaaS solutions from all leading vendors.
Contact us for more information on our Big Data offerings.