Harnessing Big Data
The world is undergoing a major shift as the “where”, the “what” and the “why” of computing changes. This is having a profound effect on all aspects of computing with a shift from on-premise to the cloud (the "where"), from transaction data to interaction data (the "what") and from desktop to mobile (the "how").
These changes affect every aspect of data:
- The volume of data that enterprises generate, consume, store, and access continues to increase exponentially. According to IDC statistics, data is expected to grow by as much as 44 times over the next year to a staggering 35.2 zettabytes of data globally.
- The type of data is changing enormously – with new types of social media and device data being stored for processing.
- The speed with which enterprises need to process data is shortening. What used to take a week must now be done in a day, while daily processing is reducing to minutes. In some cases micro-second processing is standard.
What Is Big Data?
Big data is the confluence of three technology trends:
- Big transaction data: Massive growth of transaction data volumes
- Big interaction data: Explosion of new types of data such as social media and device data
- Big data processing: Highly scalable processing with Hadoop
Every new data source is a new business opportunity. Whether it’s social media data posted by your Facebook fans, device-generated data like call detail records, or the enterprise applications of a newly acquired company, your ability to harness this information bears directly on your bottom line.
But the pace at which the volume, variety, and velocity of data has grown, leaves few organizations today equipped to take advantage of it.
Harnessing Big Data with Big Data Integration
Whether big data becomes your organization’s greatest asset or one of its gravest liabilities depends on the strategies and solutions you put in place to deal with the epic growth in data volumes, complexity, diversity, and velocity. The Informatica Platform enables you to maximize the return on all big data by providing big data integration. Big data integration can help you access and integrate data of any scale, from any source and combine it together to generate insights and value otherwise unachievable.
With big data integration, you can:
- Ensure connectivity between big transaction data, big interaction data, and big data processing
- Access high volumes of data, even if it exceeds a petabyte in scale, with native connectivity to OLTP and on-line analytical processing (OLAP) data stores
- Access new sources of information, such as social media data on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other social media, and combine it with enterprise data to enhance the single view of the customer
- Enable the hybrid enterprise by combining cloud transaction data with on-premise data
- Utilize new data processing technologies such as Hadoop without re-skilling
A number of Informatica customers are already harnessing the power of Big Data Integration to address key business initiatives. For example:
- T-Mobile uses Informatica PowerCenter to integrate data across a disparate federated architecture, including a Hadoop implementation that supports advanced customer churn analysis based on CDRs, Web logs, billing data, social media information, and more. By combining Big Transaction and Big Interaction Data, T-Mobile is gaining a more complete view of the customer and the reasons behind churn, to cut its churn in half in a single quarter.
- Trucking company US Xpress is another good example. With a far-reaching program called “No Data Left Behind,” US Xpress collects 900 data elements from tens of thousands of trucking systems— sensor data for tire and gas usage, engine operation, geospatial data for fleet tracking, and complaints posted on trucker blogs. Using Hadoop and Informatica, US Xpress processes and analyzes this Big Data to optimize fleet usage, reducing idle time and fuel consumption and saving millions of dollars a year.
- HealthNow, a healthcare insurer and service provider in upstate New York, uses Informatica Data Services to support and streamline a service-oriented architecture (SOA) spanning 16 enterprise sources, reducing data infrastructure complexity and providing a single, trusted view. Its success has positioned it to leverage Big Data, including data from social networks and the unstructured data in claims and medical notes, to support predictive analytics on healthcare issues. The company is exploring Hadoop as the framework for this Big Data initiative.
Turn Big Data into Big Opportunities
The data landscape is fertile with opportunities to improve performance across multiple domains, yet riddled with the pitfalls posed by rising data volumes, complexity, diversity, and velocity. The
Informatica Platform delivers the data integration technology that your organization can use to meet this megatrend head-on. By harnessing and combining large-scale transactional data with new interaction data and taking advantage of data-intensive frameworks, your organization can leverage your existing resources to realize the big opportunities of big data and to become a data-centric enterprise.