Big Data Analytics
Big Data Apps and Big Data PaaS
Enterprises no longer have a lack of data. Data can be obtained from everywhere. The hard part is to convert data into valuable information that can trigger positive actions. The problem is that you need currently four experts to get this process up and running:
- Data ETL expert – is able to extract, transform and load data into a central system.
- Data Mining expert – is able to suggest great statistical algorithms and able to interpret the results.
- Big Data programmer – is an expert in Hadoop, Map-Reduce, Pig, Hive, HBase, etc.
- A business expert – that is able to guide all the experts into extracting the right information and taking the right actions based on the results.
- A Big Data PaaS should focus on making sure that the first three are needed as little as possible. Ideally they are not needed at all.
How could a business expert be enabled in Big Data?
The answer is Big Data Apps and Big Data PaaS. What if a Big Data PaaS is available, ideally open source as well as hosted, that comes with a community marketplace for Big Data ETL connectors and Big Data Apps? You would have Big Data ETL connectors to all major databases, Excel, Access, Web server logs, Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, etc. For a fee different data sources could be accessed in order to enhance the quality of data. Companies should be able to easily buy access to data of others on a pay-as-you-use basis.
The next steps are Big Data Apps. Business experts often have very simple questions: “Which age group is buying my product?”, “Which products are also bought by my customers?” etc. Small re-useable Big Data Apps could be built by experts and reused by business experts.
A Big Data App example
A medium sized company is selling household appliances. This company has a database with all the customers. Another database with all the product sales. What if a Big Data App could find which products tend to be sold together and if there are any specific customer features (age, gender, customer since, hobbies, income, number of children, etc.) and other features (e.g. time of the year) that are significant? Customer data in the company’s database could be enhanced with publicly available information (from Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, etc.).
Perhaps the Big Data App could find out that parents (number of children >0), whose children like football (Facebook), are 90 percent more likely to buy waffle makers, pancake makers, oil fryers, etc. three times a year. Local football clubs might organize events three times a year to gain extra funding. Sponsorship, direct mailing, special offers, etc. could all help to attract more parents, of football-loving-kids, to the shop.
The Big Data Apps would focus on solving a specific problem each: “Finding products that are sold together”, “Clustering customers based on social aspects”, etc. As long as a simple wizard can guide a non-technical expert in selecting the right data sources and understanding the results, it could be packaged up as a Big Data App. A marketplace could exist for the best Big Data Apps. External Big Data PaaS platforms could also allow data from different enterprises to be brought together and generate extra revenue as long as individual persons cannot be identified.
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[This post originally appeared on Telruptive’s blog and is republished with permission.]
- Consultant
Maarten Ectors
Expert in Telecom and Disruptive Technologies
