Seven Top Ways We’re Using Hadoop

Enterprises are turning to Hadoop in two major scenarios, according to a recent interview with Todd Goldman, vice president and general manager for enterprise data integration at Informatica:

1. To save money on data warehouse appliances. At $30 million an appliance, companies are hesitant to invest in yet another appliance when they can offload extra data onto a $3 million Hadoop cluster. “We are seeing that a lot,” Goldman said. “There is a very large Internet financial services company doing that. They have a $30 million appliance, and they are migrating a significant portion of that data warehouse onto Hadoop, just because there is a 100-fold cost savings.”
2. For innovation. Western Union is a good example of a company that’s using Hadoop to innovate how it does business. The company wants to do online money transfers, and Hadoop allows it to quickly and cheaply perform a risk analysis before transferring the money.

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In general, risk analysis and fraud prevention are often the reason financial services companies and retailers adopt Hadoop. Back in May, Eric Sall, who oversees product marketing for IBM’s Information Management business, included “security” in the top five Big Data enterprise use cases.

“Sall says that more and more organizations are applying Big Data analytics to perimeter security, IT security and fraud prevention,” Silicon Angle reported. “Video footage is processed to identify suspicious activity, and machine logs are scanned to detect analogies that may indicate the presence of an intruder.”

IBM’s other top four uses included:

1. Big Data exploration
2. Obtaining a 360-degree view of customers
3. Operations analytics
4. Data warehouse augmentation. This is similar to Informatica’s first scenario, but IBM adds that companies also use that space as ‘landing zones’ for filtering data before it enters the warehouse.

Goldman added that another broad adoption trend is for medical and pharmaceutical researchers to use Hadoop to analyze all of the data, rather than just samples of the data.

Sramana Mitra’s interview with Goldman is five long pages, which is worth a skim at least. The first two pages mostly focus on Informatica’s own work in the Big Data space, but after that, he talks more generally about Big Data, the emerging Big Data infrastructure, and where he sees room for start-ups.