First Data Extends Reach of Big Data Analytics Service

Four Steps to Ensure Your Big Data Investment Pays Off

While organizations of just about any size have an interest in tapping into the potential of Big Data, the vast majority of them won’t have the resources required to actually do that any time soon unless they get some external help.

With that issue in mind, First Data, a provider of credit card processing services, has been building out an Insightics analytics service in the cloud that aggregates both internal data collected by First Data and external data sources. The latest external data source that First Data is including comes from Factual, provider of a location-based service that helps organizations deliver mobile experiences based on the physical location of a mobile computing device.

Sandeep Garg, vice president of information and analytics at First Data, says that rather than requiring small-to-medium-sized (SMB) organizations to build their own Big Data applications and acquire associated infrastructure, First Data has created an application that they can either interface directly or programmatically address via application programming interfaces (APIs).

In either case, access to Big Data analytics is provided as a service that is continuously maintained and updated by First Data. Obviously, that represents a new stream of revenue for First Data, while at the same time alleviating much of the need for SMBs to allocate capital to build a Big Data application that is already made available as a service.

Perhaps more challenging for SMBs is the fact that before too long there will be no shortage of similar Big Data analytics services, which will present some challenges in terms of correlating all that information. But in the meantime, IT organizations should take a second look at internal Big Data projects that may only being promising to provide insights that could be just as readily available elsewhere a whole lot sooner.