From K. Raveendran in Dublin
The buzzword in the IT world, if there was one, in the eighties was the hardware, with the likes of IBM dominating the scene entirely. In the next decade, the focus shifted to software as Microsoft relegated everything else to insignificance. Then came the World Wide Web, which turned all things upside down and flattened the globe into a small village.
The new millennium brought even more dramatic shifts, with the first decade belonging to the differentiators, led by Google, who managed to think, talk and do everything differently. Enter the next decade, the focus again shifted: this time to the social media as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn unleashed a new brutal power that saw authoritarian regimes being swept into the dustbins of history and new forms of capital and wealth being created.
What’s next? Nobody knows. A gathering of top technology scientists and bosses of leading IT companies in Dublin, Ireland, last week felt it was almost impossible to predict what would happen in the next 10 years. Such has been the speed of change in recent times that it is simply reckless to predict how technology is taking us into the next decade.
The experts were deliberating at Teradata Universe Dublin, organized by the world’s leading data warehousing and analysis company that has helped businesses get more value for the investment and marketing dollars that they spend.
The participants saw the emergence of a new currency that will be used to denominate future success in business. And that currency will neither be the pounded dollar, nor the deposed pound, of which there is nothing sterling left any more. They say the new currency will be ‘Data and ‘Big Data’.
For, it is the power of data that is enabling players like Ebay, which is anything but an automobile company, to sell 2,000 cars every week, though it does not own even one of those cars.
But this currency is absolutely of no use unless you know how to use it, say the technology scientists, who now include a new crop of specialists called data scientists. According to them, data is the lowest form of information, which can be turned through processing into knowledge and further refined to wisdom, essential for the success of any enterprise as it is in life itself. It is the job of the data scientists to engineer the transformation.
Every word that is googled these days and each comment posted on a social media like the facebook, including the ‘likes’ and even the smileys, are adding to the ‘big data’ that is being generated every minute. The volume of data generated on the social media itself is so huge that it would have deforested the planet 12 times over if these were to be printed.
IDC estimates that by 2013, 2.2 billion people worldwide will use the Internet, and 1 billion mobile devices will be used for Internet access. Using smartphones and other mobile devices, consumers have access to anybody and anything on the Internet at all times—no matter where they are. Mobile is becoming the new normal, says Stephen Brobst, Chief Technology Officer of Teradata.
The proliferation of mobile devices and a new breed of consumers are driving a revolution in requirements for pervasive access to data warehouse content. Historically, data warehouses have been constructed to provide intelligence to business knowledge workers within large enterprises. A new breed of consumers is emerging with a do-it-yourself mindset related to technology and unprecedented sophistication in using data for personal decisions. This change in consumer behavior is creating demand for Consumer Intelligence capability in which direct access to data is required for personal decision making, Brobst points out.
“With generation Y and Z consumers having grown up with technology at their fingertips and instant access to information, it is not surprising that they would demand intelligence services from the enterprises and government agencies with which they interact. The proliferation of mobile devices fuels these demands further. It is estimated that more than 30 million American adults have used a mobile device to access healthcare data of some kind. Mobile health applications use data and analytics to promote healthier lifestyles by encouraging better eating habits, exercise and adherence to medical advice from physicians,” says Brobst.
Providing consumers with access to data via enterprise is expected to create opportunities for numerous value-added services across a range of industries, such as financial services, healthcare, energy and transportation. Already banks are using business intelligence derived out of data analysis to offer event-based offerings to customers. For instance, a customer withdrawing more money than usual at an ATM will trigger an analysis to determine what exactly prompted that decision and the bank will be able to offer extended credit, if the credit record permits, as part of the same transaction. Earlier, this kind of analysis took months to perform, but can now be done instantly using the analytical tools provided by companies like Teradata. (IPA Service)
