COVER STORY BIG DATA
THE
BIGIDEA
What big data means and why a new breed of technology is required to handle it
Having already been turned on its head by the Internet, the industry now faces even greater disruption from electronic books. But the rapid digitisation of what was once the quintessential paper-driven industry has also had benefits for booksellers. According to Marc Parrish, vice president
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of retention and loyalty management at US bookseller Barnes & Noble, readers are buying more e-books than physical volumes. Such is the growth of e-book adoption that Parrish expects e-book sales to overtake paper sales within two years, he said at GigaOM’s Structure 2011 conference, held in New York in March. That inversion of the purchasing process has huge ramifications for the business, but luckily for Barnes & Noble one advantage of e-book sales is that they create reams more data. For example, having compared its
electronic and physical sales, the company now knows that e-book buyers are more conservative in their book choices, sticking to a narrower range of titles than lovers of bound paper. Simultaneously, through analysing data
collected from its physical and online stores, Barnes & Noble has established that e-book buyers who continue to buy a broad range
16 INFORMATIONAGE APRIL2011
he bookselling industry is centuries old, but its established operating model is crumbling around its ears.
of books also tend to visit their stores more. The ability to track customer behaviour online and in store is vital to Barnes & Noble going forward, says Parrish. And as the shift toward e-books becomes
more pronounced, its high street stores will be more valuable as a marketing tool, he
look at the businesses that experienced the phenomenon first: web companies such as Google, Yahoo and Facebook. For these companies, even the slightest
click by a creates a stream of data, and their users number in the hundreds of millions. All that data must be captured, managed and
“This is data that can’t just be pushed into a structured repository”
notes. Eventually, even the shop tills could become redundant.
Book publishing is just one of many industries facing a tidal wave of operational data that poses a golden opportunity. If businesses can collate, process and analyse that data, they can detect and exploit trends to stay ahead of the market. That data explosion, and the new
generation of technologies required to make use of it, is what the IT industry now commonly refers to as ‘big data’.
CHANGING PATTERN Businesses have been accumulating growing volumes of data for decades, so what makes big data a new trend? To answer that question, it is helpful to
processed at speeds that far exceed the capacity of today’s standard enterprise data management tools. According to Bill McColl, CEO of analytics
software vendor CloudScale, that is a world away from the traditional enterprise model of business intelligence, where companies typically track a few thousand entities (e.g. customers, stock items, devices). “What’s happened in the past five years has been an incredible exponential explosion,” he says. Facebook has to keep track of hundreds of millions of separate entities in real time, creating an enormous number of events every second, he says. And the volumes that the world’s largest social network handles today will soon become commonplace. Utility companies are deploying Smart
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