HADOOP-EMPOWERING BUISINESSES IN THE ERA OF BIG DATA
Boby Chaitanya,
IIM Kozhikode
Hadoop is today's business buzz word and not surprisingly though, it is used synonymously with Big Data, another popular jargon in database management circles. This synonymy can also be observed from the way the number of searches for terms Hadoop and Big Data have not only skyrocketed in the past decade but also the way in which the trends of the search terms - Hadoop (in red) and Big Data ( in blue ) have gone trended together.(See Figure 1)
Figure 1: Source http://www.google.co.in/trends/explore#q=%2Fm%2F0bs2j8q%2C%20hadoop&geo=IN&cmpt=q
And many of us wonder how large is this big data and how do modern day businesses use this big data? Every year, the world's population generates data that is large enough to fill in 80.53 billion iPhones. A few more such comparisons are given in Figure 2.
Figure 2: http://www.domo.com/blog/2013/05/the-physical-size-of-big-data/
Why should businesses use Big Data at all?
Today's consumers, at one point or another, are using the digital channels as a part of their purchase processes i.e., during product purchase, evaluation, virtually experiencing the products or even for considering a product. These consumer decisions and the related use of digital channels is generating humungous amounts of data. According to survey done by Entrepreneur.com , even today, nearly 50% of the companies, which were surveyed, have yet to master the way to measure the impact of their digital marketing efforts. It is very well known that data mining and marketing data analytics will provide substantial ROI and hence Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM) is a must for marketing any product in today's digital arena. Also big data can be used for direct marketing of products where a consumer can be identified by his/her preferences or web browsing behavior.
Amazon's product recommendations is a very good example of the same.Facebook.com is also using big data (Hadoop of course) to manage hundreds of terabytes of data generated by the Facebook users. The potential of Big Data can be maneuvered to understand and target customers, optimize business processes, improve healthcare and public administration procedures, improve science & research, optimize robotic or device performances (GPS and Data warehouses), improve security with law enforcement (NSA & Surveillance Cameras), manage financial trading and even improve sports performances ( Video analytics & IBM SlamTracker tool).Needless to say that in each of the above mentioned arenas, there is a tremendous opportunity for businesses to profit from effective utilization of Big Data.