IDC on Big Data & Real-Time Analytics for the Intelligent Enterprise

I just had the pleasure of listening to the opening session at IDC's 46th Annual Industry Briefing - Directions 2011 - presented by my old friend and former colleague, Frank Gens, IDC's SVP and Chief Analyst. I've probably seen Frank deliver more than 40 presentations in the 20 plus years I've known him, but I have to say this was his best, which is saying a lot.

A key message of Frank's talk, titled "Mobility, Clouds, Big Data, and Intelligent Industries: Positioning for the Third Wave of IT Industry Growth", was that not fully embracing the last major platform shift (PC/LANS) resulted in the downfall of industry giants like the DECs and Cullinanes of the world because they didn't make the jump. While this is perhaps not a completely new concept, it is an important lesson to remember as we enter the third phase of computing evolution - the Intelligent Enterprise built on mobile devices and applications; cloud computing; big data; social business and mobile broadband.

Here are some of my key take-aways on Big Data & Analytics from Frank's talk:

• It's not just the volume of data that is exploding but also the velocity. For example, Encore Energy in Texas is moving from reading meters once every 2 months to reading them once every 15 minutes - a 3,000 fold increase in the volume and velocity of data that will let them make real-time business decision based on analytics.
• Capturing big data and doing real-time analysis on it is a core driver of the new Intelligent Enterprise. We might throw out the vast majority of all this information and only keep what's important, but it's all about analyzing the data in motion.
• Not surprisingly, this volume and velocity of data breaks traditional relational databases and the analytic systems attached to them. A core ingredient of the last phase of computing was RDBMS, which wiped out the hierarchical DB. Today's RDBMS and the analytical tools tied to them will not disappear, but they will be marginalized and boxed out of the new growth.
• Right now, companies need to focus on the next generation of data and analytical tools.

And, as anyone who regularly reads our blog already knows, converging unstructured content and structured data, regardless of source or format, is the key to this new era of big data and comprehensive business analytics.

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