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Big Data: What it is and 5 reasons why companies are moving to Big Data

 July 9  | 0 Comments

Big Data is a term used to denote voluminous data. How big is Big Data? It is measured in petabytes–which is 1024 terabytes-converting to records, this means trillions of records of data of millions of people. The sheer size of the data size is beyond the realm of the traditional database tools. Analyzing huge data and coming out with relevant and useful information is crucial to Business Intelligence. Therefore tools that process this huge data, provide statistics and insight into trends, give the Companies ideas to formulate new business strategies, and a competitive edge. The technology which includes these tools and processes is also referred to as Big Data by the companies.

5 Reasons Why Companies are moving to Big Data:

1. Find New Business Opportunities

The most recent example is the General elections of 2014 in India. The Election campaign was based on the information gleaned about the voters’ interests and reactions through social media sites, civic issues of different states and statistics related to employment. All these were acknowledged and addressed in the campaign, thereby touching a chord with the voters and swaying their votes. This whole data gathering and analytics was done by a team of computer savvy experts who used Big Data in a big way!

Big Data is used in retail, where insights are gained on customer interests by capturing information on the websites they browse and what their online purchases are. For example, if you have browsed for books on Android yesterday, today, when you open your favorite online bookstore, it shows you various books based on Android technology.

2. To Connect with Customers Using Their Own Data

Today the awareness on health issues is at its peak. Making better lifestyle choices to boost health is not the prerogative of only the wealthy. This in turn has created a huge market for fitness equipment and many health products. Devices that assimilate personal data like Nike+ Fuel, FitBit, and Jawbones UP are handy and helpful in keeping track of vital parameters. These products give you more data about yourself than you know. For example, there is a product MyFitnessPal, which will not only give the calories consumed but also the breakdown of proteins, fat, and carbs. This is heaven sent data not only for athletes but for people with diabetes also. So, it is clear that Companies in Healthcare and Fitness are directly reaching out to customers with intensely useful devices which provide personal data. In order to cater to this genre of customers, and to keep their interest intact, these companies gather, analyze millions of records of personal data – again using Big Data technology!

3. To Provide Better Customer Service Interactions

The age old adage that says – to cater to a customer issue, the response time should not exceed six seconds may sound unreasonable for some. But the truth is that the faster a consumer complaint can be responded to, the higher the respect that company will garner from consumers. For this to happen, a Customer Service Operator needs to have the consumer related data in front while interacting. And this in turn requires tools good enough to extract customer information at the click of a button. With millions of consumers for products and brands which are multinational, the customer database runs into unimaginable sizes as the time goes and very clearly pointing to the same need – process Big Data!

An added complexity to data handling in today’s age is that data is no longer only in the form of text, it is available as text, audio, and video. To extract information from audio and video, natural language processing tools are needed. An example tool is MatterSight used in Call Centers. It routes a customer call to the appropriate department for better service. It does this using audio analysis.

4. To Promote Right Products to the Customers

Companies need to have the capacity to predict what customers want even before they ask for it. They can do this only through the data collected on their customers. Data is not relegated to what the customer does at their website but other websites too.

5. Identify and Resolve Customer Pain Points

We all know that Companies that keep in mind the pain points of the customer are the ones that earn their loyalty. A good example is the concern of lost baggage by air passengers. One Airline (Delta) has come up with an App which requires you to take a snap of your baggage tag using the “Track my baggage” feature. Even if the baggage doesn’t reach its intended destination, this App saves a lot of time in tracking it down. One can imagine the number of air passengers who would use this data and in the number of geographical locations across the globe – this App surely generates millions of baggage data records on a daily basis-rather on a 24/7 basis!

 

Exceptional technologies of Big Data

By now it is clear that to the Companies, Big Data means that data is generated for millions of customers and the analysis that goes with it is very complex and requires specific data analysis tools and simply cannot be done with the traditional programming languages that one has been learning in Colleges. Another dimension is that Big Data is used across the world across multiple domains-Government, Healthcare, Manufacturing, Retail, Retail and Banking, and Science and Research. Instead of using off the shelf Big Data products, companies prefer to develop and maintain their own in-house Applications.

Thus we have companies globally moving towards Big Data and requiring new talent i.e. people skilled in Big Data tools. The people working with Big Data tools are called as Data Scientists. As per Harvard Data Scientists are in short supply and this is one role that will be the “in” thing in the 21st century!!

In fact, job sites have termed this phenomenon as “Desperately Seeking Data Scientists! With so many opportunities out there for Data Scientists, it is almost imperative that fresher, experienced and those wanting a chunk of the Big Data boom should aim to learn Big Data development and one of the places to learn it is ACADGILD.

ACADGILD offers an online course on Big Data Development which is entirely driven by mentors, who will teach you all that is needed to become a skilled hands-on Big Data Developer in a span of 12 weeks. This will entail two sessions every week, with each session comprising of one and a half hour. Apart from these sessions you will spend 200 hours on assignment and project work. The emphasis will be on making you ready to code rather than just learn the concepts. At ACADGILD we believe in the philosophy – learn by doing. During the course you will learn

1. About Eclipse, Hadoop, HBase, Hive, Oozie, Spark and Spooq.
2. Practically install the above mentioned tools in your systems.
3. Learn techniques to develop code using them.

Additionally, you will develop two projects of your choice with guidance from mentors. Finally, you will be job ready with not only the coding skills but with interview facing skills as well.

 

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