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Big Data: Vendors Rebrand their Products as 'Big Data Solutions'
Gartner estimates that globally businesses will spend $232 Billion on IT related to Big Data from now through 2016.
A Gartner survey found that 42 percent of organizations say that they’ve invested in Big Data technologies or will do so within the next 12 months. Doug Laney, analyst at Gartner, said that “Organisations have increased their understanding of what big data is and how it could transform the business in novel ways. The new key questions have shifted to ‘What are the strategies and skills required?’ and ‘How can we measure and ensure our return on investment?'”
But not all of Gartner’s analysts totally buy into the Big Data hype. Gartner analyst Debra Logan, for one, questions the results of Gartner’s own survey and others that suggest that large numbers of customers are already actively using Big Data.
Part of the difference in opinions may reflect the definition that’s used for what ‘Big Data’ really is. The hype over Big Data has caused most vendors to scramble, and then reinvent and recharacterize their products as being able to address the issues of Big Data. John A. De Goes, CEO of Precog, maker of a data analytics platform, said that “any established vendor offering a storage or analytics product for a tiny or a large amount of data is now branded as big data, even if their technology is exactly the same as it was 5 years ago (thank you, marketing departments!). Startups, too, lay claim to the moniker of ‘big data app’ or ‘big data startup,’ eager to soak up some of the big data money floating around in big data-focused VC funds. The phrase ‘big data’ is now beyond completely meaningless.
Toby Wolpe at ZDNet has some interesting quotes from Gartner’s Logan on her view of Big Data hype. Logan said that “I would say that 95 to 97 percent of the organisations that I know — outside research organisations, people who crunch weather data, that kind of thing — are in fact only in the exploratory phase right now. Of that 97 percent, how many are actually going to have big-data issues or big-data benefits?… Software companies in general have no interest in helping you make anything smaller because they make their money from more data and the more disorganized that data is, the more money they make.”
Logan said that “Again what question are you asking? What is it that a massive set of data tells you about a particular problem that a more reasonable set of data about a problem doesn’t tell you?”
