Getting Value from Big Data

Shawn Rogers, industry analyst at Enterprise Management Associates, just released a whitepaper on big data.

He is doing a webinar on June 1, so register if you're interested in hearing more from him.

Shawn is not just a critic. He's been a player: he has more than 19 years of hands-on IT experience, with a focus on Internet-enabled technology. He also co-founded the BeyeNETWORK. He's been watching as business intelligence has adapted to deal with ever-more complex environments, caused in large part by the explosion in the amount of data that companies now use.

Shawn's main advice for working with Big Data:

• Use self-service solutions. When you're dealing with huge volumes of data, not every report can be anticipated and built months in advance. Users must be able to ask and answer thier own questions.
• Don't forget about collaboration when working with big data. It's more effective than having lone analysts crunching numbers, and lets the data have more of an impact.
• In-memory capabilities are critical to big data environments because they let people speed up and work with millions of rows of data on their PCs.
• But the ability to connect directly to data is necessary too. Customers need to leverage fast databases if they have them.
• Blending data from different sources solves some key big data scenarios.