The ever-increasing quantity of data generates enormous challenges, but also generates significant business opportunities for sales and marketing professionals of small and midsize companies.
The era of “Big Data” is clearly upon us as sales and marketing professionals. For those of you who’ve been checked out of Hotel Reality for a while, big data is a bit of a catchall phrase and definitely one of the more hyped terms of the past couple of years.
Simply put, big data refers to a collection of data sets so large and complex that it becomes difficult to process using traditional data processing applications. Although estimates vary widely, research conducted by CSC estimates a 4,300 percent increase in annual data generation by 2020.
This ever-increasing quantity of data generates enormous challenges, but also generates significant business opportunities. Data processing is no longer the sole domain of relational databases. Unstructured data such as digital photos, videos and social media are growing at an even faster rate than structured data.
As a result, an entire new industry has formed around technologies aimed at storing, sorting, viewing and gleaning business insights from big data. Companies such as Hortonworks and Cloudera help businesses manage their data using a new open-source data framework called Hadoop. Companies like Tableau, Birst and Domo help their customers see and understand their data in profoundly new ways. Collectively, these companies have generated billions of dollars of financing from investors of all stripes interested in profiting from the explosion of big data.
