Five Ideas: Dealing With Data

Big data trends for 2013

Oracle recently sponsored The Big Data Innovation Summit, which took place in Las Vegas on January 30 and 31. There, business leaders and industry innovators from Fortune 500 companies discussed the challenge of storage, management, analysis, visualization, security— and how to leverage big data to enhance company performance and achieve increased customer insight. Missed the summit? Here's what the experts we've been talking to have to say about turning big data into big opportunities.

“With big data, normal architectures and business intelligence methodologies may not apply. The challenge in mastering big data technology is that it varies in context of the analysis. Leaders will identify repeatable patterns of technology that can be mastered for efficient scale.” —Yashpaul Singh Dogra, senior director with Oracle Insight

“For the IT department, the ability to monetize the value of big data from unexpected big insights will have profound impacts. Companies will need to start to reevaluate what type of data they collect and how long it is stored, prioritize data sets in new ways, and based on new uses of data, change which data is deemed mission critical.” —Christopher J. Sowa, vice president of Oracle Insight and co-head of Oracle’s Global Business Intelligence and Exalytics Strategy Pillar

“Mistakes are costly for any business. And with the advent of datafication, where single systems are carrying more and more responsibility for the business, they're becoming even costlier.” —Paul Vallée, executive chairman and founder of Pythian

“Whether its fine-tuning supply chains, monitoring shop floor operations, or gauging consumer sentiment, leading companies are scrutinizing not just transactional data but all their data: structured, semi-structured, and traditional...So the new breed of data warehouse must be able to capture and analyze social media, location information, sensor data, email, audio, images, conversations, and many forms of machine-generated data.” —Bob Evans, senior vice-president of communications for Oracle

“The big highlight is that we've put a lot more memory into Oracle Exadata X3—both flash memory and RAM. Technology advances very quickly between generations, but normally very quickly means 20 to 30 percent a year. In Oracle Exadata X3, we've quadrupled the amount of flash memory.” —Juan Loaiza, Oracle senior vice president of systems technology