IBM says:
“Ultimately, big data is a combination of these characteristics [of volume, variety, velocity, and veracity] that creates an opportunity for organizations to gain competitive advantage in today’s digitized marketplace. It enables companies to transform the ways they interact with and serve their customers, and allows organizations – even entire industries – to transform themselves. Not every organization will take the same approach toward engaging and building its big data capabilities. But opportunities to utilize new big data technology and analytics to improve decisionmaking and performance exist in every industry.”
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Companies will use Big Data to better understand their customers and then to dynamically provide personalized offerings to each consumer.
Building these Big Data capabilities will take money and resources. The research people at Gartner think Big Data will drive over $220 billion of IT spending this year and in 2013.
They predict that before 2015 Big Data will create 4.4 million jobs. The US is not going to be able to provide enough talent, so only one in four of the new Big Data jobs is expected to go to Americans.
Big Data needs a new type of technologies. Gartner also pointed out that today’s standard computer infrastructures are quickly becoming obsolete. We are moving to environments consisting of mobile and cloud platforms.
The ground is definitely shifting under our feet. On the positive side, those with technical backgrounds have an excellent ground-floor opportunity to use our skills in this new Big Data world. On the negative side, without ongoing effort to acquire new skills the world could pass us by.