I attended a very worthwhile roundtable this week, organized by Actian, a Big Data business analytics company. It was a very good mix of analysts, investors, media and users.
I learned a lot about Hadoop, and Actian, and enterprise use and misuse of analytics primarily because the discussion was not all about how wonderful everything is, but a warts and all, frank discussion of the challenges in the enterprise space for Hadoop based analytics.
Actian says that SQL is still very important in business analytics and for its customers because that's what the enterprise workforce knows. And that Hadoop makes it cost effective to process analysis faster, or add additional data that wasn't practical before, potentially netting companies with a lift in revenues. As much as 2% is typical for large companies.
There's gold in the data but... which data? What are the questions? Do you need to know the right questions to ask? Or can you find them automatically, which is the claim of some? Big Data amplifies the challenges in enterprise business analytics.
It was good to see M.R. Rangaswami, from Sandhill Group, who helped lead the discussion. And Bob Rogers, Chief Data Scientist for Big Data Solutions at Intel, added some interesting perspectives.
Ray Wang, founder of Constellation Research, had a chance to promote his new book with a superb presentation where he didn't seem to take a breath yet it wasn't a breathless speech. I'll post a recording of it, it is well worth hearing.
Disrupting Digital Business: Create an Authentic Experience in the Peer-to-Peer Economy - By R "Ray" Wang.
Ray's take the on the digital economy is that the top company usually gets most of the market, (Please see: The Problem Of Scale: Building The Next Big Silicon Valley Company -SVW) and that the only way to compete against the giants is by using your intuition, your specialist understanding of a market. It's not a cheerful analysis because it implies small businesses can't grow into giant-killers.
Here are some of the findings from a recent survey Actian commissioned about Hadoop in the enterprise: