Nokia Siemens Network declared the death of big data in a blog post earlier this month. The company claimed that carriers should embrace what it calls “right data,” which according to NSN, is “the information that will actually enable operators to generate true insights and take actions to create real value.”
To justify this statement, NSN cited a recent Infochimps Big Data survey showing that 55% of big data projects aren’t completed and many others don’t meet their objectives. It also noted that due to the volume of data being processed, a traditional big data approach would be unable to produce real-time insights or the cost would be so high that it would jeopardize the entire project.
In Matt Donnelly’s weekly review of the top telecom news and trends, the Pyramid Research managing editor said that NSN’s statement reminded him of the pushback against social media marketing: What’s the ROI from big data projects? “If NSN had its way, future data projects conducted by operators would be smaller scale and generate ‘true real-time insights with the right level of effort and investments from the operator,’” he wrote.
This discussion is far from over. Noel Yuhanna and Mike Gualtieri, principal analysts at Forrester Research, wrote an article in The Wall Street Journal entitled “Big data lives or dies based on customer data management strategy.” They argued that the key to success is implementing a multidimensional view that helps individualize and contextualize customer experiences, deliver new customer insights and create new opportunities for businesses to deliver differentiated experiences. This requires a new IT architecture, which is based on four key technology components: big data, predictive analytics, in-memory technologies and data virtualization.
“The business benefits of these four technologies help overcome the gaps and limitations of traditional data management platforms to support real-time data integration, exploit new data sources and speed the generation of predictive customer insights,” they said.
Although the Infochimps survey, cited by Nokia Siemens Networks, states that 55% of big data projects are never completed, Gartner predicts that 2013 will be the year of larger scale adoption of big data technologies. According to a worldwide Gartner survey of IT leaders, 42% of respondents stated they had invested in big data technology or were planning to do so within a year.
As pointed out by Doug Laney, Gartner research vice president, most organizations are still in the early stages of big data projects, and few have thought through an enterprise approach or realized the profound impact that big data will have on their infrastructure, organizations and industries.
Check out what else is happening in the market:
- Sandvine, a provider of intelligent broadband network solutions for fixed and mobile operators, announced it has deployed more than 40 plug-and-play video optimization, parental control and content caching solutions with leading vendors Mobixell, Netsweeper and PeerApp. These partnerships were formed over the last few years, and the companies have been engaged in deploying joint solutions in both fixed and mobile networks worldwide. Sandvine also released that it has received more than $3 million in follow-on orders from a leading North American cable operator that has been a Sandvine customer since 2005.
- Cyber Innovation Labs, an infrastructure-as-a-service provider, and NEC Corporation of America, provider and integrator of ICT announced the utilization of the so-called “Cloud in a Vault” (CiaV) for the deployment of what the companies claimed to be the next-generation in big data solutions. CiaV is a 100% dedicated, fully managed and scalable private cloud offering that combines NEC’s Nblock™ integrated IT infrastructure with security, compliance and monitoring in a hosted environment.
- The in-memory technologies for enterprise big data company, Terracotta, unveiled its BigMemory version 4.0, the newest version of its flagship in-memory data platform. With this new version, the company promises that enterprises will be able to move up to hundreds of terabytes of high-value data from slow disk drives to machine memory for blazingly fast, predictable access.
Finally, check out the latest International Data Corporation (IDC) numbers on the smart connected device market: IDC found that worldwide shipments of smart connected devices grew 29.1% year-over-year in 2012, crossing 1 billion units shipped with a value of U.S. $576.9 billion. The market expansion was largely driven by 78.4% year-over-year growth in tablet shipments, which surpassed 128 million in 2012.
The telecom analytics series provides weekly insights on trends, new products and other topics that touch on the advantages and monetization opportunities of analytics tools for telecom operators, including big data, business intelligence, customer experience analysis and management, business analytics and network analytics.
