Four Steps to Ensure Your Big Data Investment Pays Off
Just about every strategic IT initiative being pursued in the enterprise these days eventually comes back to figuring out how to exploit data to gain a competitive advantage. Naturally, that leads to a lot of time and effort being spent with any number of Big Data platforms.
The challenge, of course, is that business people are not known for their patience. Internal IT organizations today still spend too much of their time trying to master Big Data infrastructure. From a business person’s perspective, it’s frustrating to hear that the data scientist the company just hired for well over $100,000 a year is spending most of their time on plumbing issues.
Looking to help organizations get past many of those issues, Hewlett-Packard has launched HP Business Intelligence Modernization Services, which spans everything from implementing tools to better visualize data to the complete outsourcing of Big Data analytics.
Martin Risau, senior vice president for analytics and data management for HP Enterprise Services, says HP has amassed a small army of 1,200 analysts and data scientists who can work with organizations to get the most out of their Big Data investments regardless of whether those platforms are running on premise or in the cloud. In the cloud, HP is making available a Big-Data-as-a-service offering that leverages the company’s HAVEn platform, which is based on HP Vertica columnar databases, the Intelligent Data Operating Layer (IDOL) technology that HP gained with its controversial acquisition of Autonomy, and the Hadoop distribution created by Hortonworks, in which HP has invested $50 million.
Now that the Autonomy business unit that HP gained is part of a Big Data Business group inside HP Software, it’s simpler for HP to marshal all of its Big Data platforms to drive a service.
When it comes to Big Data in general and advanced analytics in particular, many organizations don’t have much in the way of hands-on experience. The good news is that there are now a slew of IT service firms willing to compete for the privilege of helping those organizations gain that knowledge before their rivals do the same.
