Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
CHAPTER
5
Big Data Driving Business Value
Technology is like a fish. The longer it stays on the shelf, the less desirable it becomes.
—Andrew Heller
INTRODUCTION
The world we live in today is accelerated by no single business or product, but by us—the consumers,
the drivers of demand for specific products or services. The advances in mobile technologies coupled
with the advent of smart devices and the rise of generation Z have created a perfect storm for com-
panies to transform themselves from being product-centric to being a service-centric organization.
But how successful can the transformation strategy be for an organization? And, more importantly,
how does your organization make decisions on what areas to transform, and what is the timing of this
transformation? How does a customer behavior or a market trend introduce disruption in the current
strategy?
This chapter focuses on the emergence of social media, sensor networks, and other Big Data
sources that provide a deeper and factual insight on the metrics that are used in decision analytics and
how companies have adopted these different data artifacts to create better services for their customers
in a B2B and B2C environment.
The case studies discussed in this chapter focus on the following areas:
●
The business problem—what are real-world companies looking to solve when data is available in
an integrated ecosystem across the enterprise.
●
The data problem—what issues confront the companies from a data perspective: volume,
availability, granularity, or formats.
●
The business case—how these companies have approached developing the business case and what
return on investment (ROI) have they been able to associate with the overall solution.
As you read this chapter, you will realize that your organization and many others will have a wish-
list of problems you would like to solve. Different vendors who are integrating Hadoop and NoSQL
into their solution ecosystem have provided the case studies that you will read in this chapter. While
some of these solutions are ground-breaking architectures, there are more details in the following
chapters that will help and guide your thinking when you set out to build your own solutions.
The author would like to extend thanks to all vendors who readily shared these case studies for the
benefit of the readers.
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