Big data processing could be the way all data is processed

An IT industry analyst article published by SearchITOperations.

Some organizations take their time with new technologies to let first adopters suffer the growing pains. But there’s no treading water in the big data stream; the current won’t wait.

Mike Matchett
Small World Big Data

Have you noticed yet? Those geeky big data platforms based on clusters of commodity nodes running open source parallel processing algorithms are evolving into some seriously advanced IT functionality.

The popular branded distributions of the Apache projects, including Hortonworks, Cloudera and MapR, are no longer simply made up of relatively basic big data batch query tools, such as Hadoop MapReduce, the way they were 10 years ago. We’ve seen advances in machine learning, SQL-based transaction support, in-memory acceleration, interactive query performance, streaming data handling, enterprise IT data governance, protection and security. And even container services, scheduling and management are on a new level. Big data platforms now present a compelling vision for the future of perhaps all IT data processing.

Wait — do I really mean all IT data center processing will be big data processing? Most of us are just getting used to the idea of investing in and building out functional data lakes to capture and collect tons of unstructured data for business intelligence tasks, offline machine learning, active archive and other secondary data applications. And many are having a hard time making those data lake initiatives successful. It’s a challenge to develop staff expertise, assure data provenance, manage metadata and master implied schemas, i.e., creating a single version of truth.

…big data isn’t just for backroom data science geeks. The technologies involved are going to define the next-generation IT data center platform…

Many organizations may be waiting for things in the big data market to settle out. Unfortunately, especially for those more comfortable being late adopters, big data processing technology development is accelerating. We see use cases rapidly proliferate, and general IT manageability of big data streams (easing adoption and integration) greatly increase.

The universal big data onslaught is not going to slow down, nor will it wait for slackers to catch up. And those able to harness their big data streams today aren’t just using them to look up old baseball stats. They are able to use data to improve and accelerate operations, gain greater competitiveness and achieve actual ROI. I’m not even going to point out the possibility that savvy big data processing will uncover new revenue opportunities and business models. Oops, just did!

If you think you are falling behind today on big data initiatives, I’d recommend you consider doubling down now. This area is moving way too fast to jump on board later and still expect to catch competitors. Big data is proving to be a huge game changer. There simply won’t be a later with big data.

I’ve written before that all data is eventually going to be big data. I’ll now add that all processing is eventually going to be big data processing. In my view, the focus of big data technology has moved from building out systems of insight over trailing big data sets to now offering ways to build convergent systems of action over all data.

In other words, big data isn’t just for backroom data science geeks. The technologies involved are going to define the next-generation IT data center platform…(read the complete as-published article there)