Big data was one of the top topics at this year’s customer conference. According to leading managers of the market leader, the transformative power of technology cannot be overestimated. Anyone who leaves any publicly visible digital traces in the future should think twice about it. Because everyone has to be prepared for the fact that in the future, this data will be evaluated in a completely different, innovative way than before – in such a way that billions of potential in new sales or save costs for companies result.
“Data is the oil of the future.” EMC is not alone in making this assessment. The latter quoted the IBM group saying that companies with sophisticated data analysis could immediately achieve 33% more sales.
Big Data Is A Transformative Force For IT And Business
EMC wants to actively contribute to promoting the info oil and making money in the process. The manufacturer, who put its event under the motto “Transform IT and Yourself,” sees big data as one of the two great transformative forces transforming IT and business life. But while the influence of cloud computing is more limited to the internal area of IT service provision, big data intervenes directly in the core business.
EMC has tried it out itself: Among other things, all internal documents were digitized, then processed and connected to all possible high-level analysis tools via EMC’s Greenplum big data cockpit, which was purchased, and together with data from the remaining of the approximately 4,000 data sources, the EMC uses, analyzed.
“We were able to answer a lot of questions that we would never have thought possible, but we were also downright shocked by the depth of the findings,” EMC advises each big data customer to set up a special committee when the products are implemented. Hollis couldn’t say whether customers would follow this advice.
There is great interest in technology. “Big data comes faster than many think” when presenting the results of a survey that was carried out in parallel with registration in the run-up to the event among 200 participants. Of these, 6% stated that they are already using big data today. Another 25% are currently dealing with the topic or want to do so in a short time. 29% of those surveyed thought that the use of big data tools would be decisive for the success of companies in the next few years.
Big Data Can Be Used To Individualize Credit Risks And Insurance Tariffs
“For example, you can use data from unconventional but easily exploitable data sources such as social media, sensor data, or data from image acquisition systems together with conventional data to determine the price and value perception of customers and their changes as individually as possible.” To put it simply: Big data experts experience, For example, how much you can probably ask someone for a product before that particular person waves it away, or estimate much more accurately than today how high a person’s risk is of suffering certain damage, accidents or illnesses.
It is conceivable that a property buyer will receive an offer tailored to his specific credit risk in the blink of an eye. According to CTO Hollis, insurance tariffs could also be consistently individualized with Big Data. A prospect is likely to send shivers of horror rather than anticipation down the back consumers and data protectionists in particular.
But at the moment, there are still many unanswered questions about big data. EMC is therefore investing heavily in research. For example, how massive, globally distributed databases can be analyzed at their respective locations, and then the results of the partial analyses can be centralized, so that information relevant to decision-making is derived from them.
There Is Currently A Lack Of Prominent Data Specialists
From the point of view of industry and users, the biggest problem with big data is that there are not enough specialists who can filter out the desired findings from the data desert with innovative analysis methods. For this, completely different skills are required than the operational business intelligence specialists. Big data is a field for real nerds, statistics freaks, and mathematicians with a sense of unconventional thinking. The shortfall is put into six digits worldwide. Here EMC wants to distinguish itself through its curricula and courses, which are available for employees and customers and are enjoying great interest.
“IBM only offers its customers the option of purchasing consulting services from IBM Global Services if customer-specific solutions are to be created. We want customers to learn what they need to do to analyze their data”. That sounds generous, but it could also be because EMC does not have as large a fleet of consultants under its roof as IBM and relies on partners here. EMC partner Bull, for example, even bought a consulting company with knowledge in this sector for big data jobs from the automotive industry.
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