Big Data Applications Head into Production

Big Data Applications Start to Gain Traction

While the hype curve surrounding Big Data and all things related to Apache Hadoop will probably reach a pinnacle in 2013, a new survey of 516 IT professionals, conducted by King Research on behalf of Actuate, a provider of the open source BIRT reporting tools, found on average that organizations are planning to use 4.5 Big Data applications each, and organizations with revenue of over $1 billion reported they already have 3.2 Big Data applications in use.

While that may not seem like a huge number of applications, Nobby Akiha, senior vice president of marketing for Actuate, says it clearly shows that corporate interest in Big Data applications is moving well beyond the pilot stage. Of course, not all of these applications will be deployed on top of Hadoop. But the survey makes it clear that Hadoop by far will be the dominant platform for running these applications.

In fact, the limiting factor when it comes to building these applications is no longer the technology but rather access to the data scientists who have the skills needed to build these applications, says Akiha.

As a result, Akiha says that best thing for most organizations is to prioritize Big Data applications based on the problems the business needs to solve, versus simply trying to find the biggest Big Data application possible. Based on the survey results, most of those applications appear to be squarely aimed at analyzing customer data.

The goal, of course, of all these applications is to make better decisions faster using all available data sources. What’s not exactly clear is how all the information will be distributed and consumed by the average employee, which once organizations get comfortable with the whole Big Data idea may turn out to be the next major hurdle IT organizations have to face.