Big Data Analytics: Turning Big Data into Big Money

Chapter 10

Bringing It All Together

The promises offered by data-driven decision making have been widely recognized. Businesses have been using business intelligence (BI) and business analytics for years now, realizing the value offered by smaller data sets and offline advanced processing. However, businesses are just starting to realize the value of Big Data analytics, especially when paired with real-time processing.

That has led to a growing enthusiasm for the notion of Big Data, with businesses of all sizes starting to throw resources behind the quest to leverage the value out of large data stores composed of structured, semistructured, and unstructured data. Although the promises wrapped around Big Data are very real, there is still a wide gap between its potential and its realization.

That wide gap is highlighted by those who have successfully used the concepts of Big Data at the outset. For example, it is estimated that Google alone contributed $54 billion to the U.S. economy in 2009, a significant economic effect, mostly attributed to the ability to handle large data sets in an efficient manner.

That alone is probably reason enough for the majority of businesses to start evaluating how Big Data analytics can affect the bottom line, and those businesses should probably start evaluating Big Data promises sooner rather than later.

Delving into the value of Big Data analytics reveals that elements such as heterogeneity, scale, timeliness, complexity, and privacy problems can ...