2014 Big Data Outlook: Opportunities and Challenges
Given the general shortage of talent when it comes to all things Big Data, it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise to see vendors jockeying to make Big Data expertise available as a service. With that goal in mind, Teradata this week acquired Think Big Analytics, a consulting firm that specializes in building Big Data applications.
Chris Twogood, vice president of product and services marketing for Teradata, says Think Big Analytics will continue to operate as an independent arm of Teradata’s larger consulting arm. Think Big Analytics is specifically focused on Big Data platforms based on Hadoop, HBase, Cassandra and MongoDB, and Storm, which Teradata views as a natural complement to its existing relational database technologies and consulting services.
With data warehouses now spanning both traditional relational databases and Big Data platforms such as Hadoop and MongoDB, IT organizations find they don’t have the internal expertise required to build Big Data applications. Think Big Analytics will build those applications on the behalf of customers, who then choose to deploy them on premise or in the cloud.
In addition, Think Big Analytics provides customers the opportunity to enroll in Think Big Academy, a set of training courses taught by the firm’s consulting experts. Think Big Analytics Co-founder and President Rick Farnell says that rather than looking for “unicorns” that don’t exist, most organizations would be better off training their existing staff to become proficient in leveraging Big Data.
Obviously, Teradata isn’t the only vendor investing in Big Data consulting services. The one thing to consider is just how much demand there is for people with Big Data skills. Assuming vendors can pay top dollar for those skills, chances are the pool of Big Data professionals that enterprise IT organizations can afford to hire is even smaller than most IT organizations realize. Given that reality, the only practical option is to lean on consultants until they can turn their existing staff into the Big Data experts they really need.
