In this post, I’d just like to share with you why I’m really excited about Big Data solutions. In a previous role, I was the head of an IT division for a successful finance company. This was a few years ago but even back then, we knew that analytics was critical to increase revenue and profit for the company. We needed to consolidate our existing data warehousing systems and add further analytic capability to our technology stack.
I got a couple of vendors in to quote a solution. After I received the quotes back, I was surprised at how expensive the ‘Phase One’ solutions were. The solutions required expensive, high performant and resilient hardware to operate on. Even though the licensing costs were expensive, it was industry standard at the time. But what caught my attention was the professional services and what that entailed.
Legacy business intelligence solutions required developers to code a ‘extract, transform and load’ (ETL) process. This translated data from various sources into a structured format that business intelligence technologies could work with. This ETL phase in the project was expensive. However, this ‘infrastructure’ was required before any real value could be delivered to the business. If business insight and evidence based decisions are critical to modern organisations, why was was this so expensive?
The solution is with Big Data technologies that were developed by leading Silicon Valley companies such as Google, Yahoo and Amazon. Although these technologies can scale to the incredible requirements of these companies, they also provide an extremely cost effective solution to many Small to Medium Enterprises.
Business insight can now be delivered to all organisations regardless of their size and budget. These solutions scale extremely well from one commodity server either on premise or cloud to the thousands of servers. Licensing of the technology stack ranges from open source to cost effective vendor licensing that includes enterprise level support. What I find really exciting is the ability to work with all types of data in its raw form that avoids the expensive ‘ETL’ process mentioned above.
We are excited about how these solutions can deliver real competitive advantage to your organisations for a fraction of the cost that you may expect.
Please do contact us to discuss your particular requirements.
Thanks for reading the post.
Regards,
Gaj