The good news about the Big Data market is that we generally all agree on the definition of Big Data, which has come to be known as data that has volume, velocity and variety where businesses need to collect, store, manage and analyze in order to derive business value or otherwise known as the “4 V’s.” However, the problem with such a broad definition is that it can mean different things to different people once you start to put some real values next to those V’s.
Let’s be honest, Volume can be a different thing to different organizations. To some it is anything above 10 terabytes of managed data in their BI environment and to others it is petabyte scale and nothing less. Likewise velocity can be multi-billions of daily records coming into the enterprise from various external and internal networks. When it really comes down to it, each business situation will be quite different not only from a size and speed perspective but also more important from the business use-case or requirement. A large bank’s Big Data problem could be very different to that of an online retailer or an airline. If you compare what say a hospital is trying to do collecting and analyzing all the sensor patient data compared to a utilities provider running a smart-grid or a telecommunications operator. True, all could be categorized as machine generated or raw data but the exact type of data might be different not to mention the volume or growth rate. Probably the one unique common denominator across all aforementioned industries is that everyone is keeping the data for longer time-periods. No one is throwing it away – not even the detailed data.