Is it Still Big Data If It Fits In Your Pocket?

Presented by Dave Campbell, Microsoft Technical Fellow from the Strata Online Conference on Wednesday, 12/07/11

Big Data is all the rage. While the big data systems, patterns, and value were initially demonstrated at Petabyte scale with large scale Internet services, Big Data is applicable in any organization, regardless of organization size or volume of data. In fact, many early adopters of Big Data technologies in the commercial space are seeing significant top and bottom line enhancements through their use of these emerging technologies. The ultimate question is around new business value gets created out of the abundant “ambient data” produced by existing and emerging IT systems. How do we transform these raw data into new knowledge that matters for the business in an efficient fashion?

Microsoft Fellow David Campbell has spent time over the last several years trying to answer many of these questions to his own satisfaction, particularly determining how "data finds data" and how to turn data into knowledge in new ways. As part of the journey he's witnessed a number of natural patterns that emerge in big data processing as well as encountered many companies that are understanding how to think differently about their data influx and use technology as a key differentiator in this strategy. In this short talk he will present examples of success from several industries and describe several Big Data patterns and illustrate them across a scale spectrum from megabytes to 100s of petabytes. Finally, he will offer some thoughts around how the market may evolve in response to these opportunities.