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Big Data? Really?

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This is a short post - I couldn't hold it back any longer.

Anyone you come across today - from the office elevator (I guess the old water-cooler analogy is dead) to the weekend party - that is remotely connected to technology or business, talks "big-data". I heard someone recently say 'yeah, we are into big-data analytics too', and these guys were running a small IT staffing shop.

I won't bore you with the text book definitions or tell you in detail what it is (though personally I like the quick snippet that comes up in Google search, source Wikipedia). What I want to tell you is this ... use that jargon only if you want to look like a complete dork if anyone remotely aware of the field is around.

 Data & analytics has been around forever. Internet and more recently social graphs are producing vast amounts of data (a lot of which is useless, IMO), which lead to the term "big-data" - and it simply refers to data of size & model that traditional reporting tools can't deal with easily.

New tools today and cloud infrastructure that scales very well provide the ability to sift through them, make sense and produce insights that are actionable. So between big-data and analytics sits the drudgery of managing the massive amount of unstructured data, finding out common elements, de-duplicating them, throwing out the chaff and making it palatable for analysis.

Next time, keep the above in mind and throw around some sound-bites ... you might at least sound intelligent.

And for insights on how it is actually used to create business value, head over to http://www.fantain.com. 
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