The 7 Temptations of Big Data Part 2

In the previous post, we suggested the first 3 temptations of Big Data you must avoid. On the menu of this delicious appetizer, you could enjoy many temptations gargantuan volume of data, new sources of information and play with unstructured data.

This new post will take you to 7th heaven (I hope …), or at least until the 7th Temptation of Big Data .

Temptation 4: Predict the Future

The statistics are not a new discipline. But they know a new impetus to the Big Data era. This is called Data Science and Techniques Data Mining and Machine Learning. The objective is to achieve better understanding of what is happening (descriptive statistics) and predict the future.

This intelligence conducted by algorithms becomes necessary before the flood of data that is no longer handled on a human scale and to exploit fully the diversity of Big Data data (especially if you yield to the temptations 1 to 3).

The more advanced uses of Data Science techniques can predict the future. On a recent project, for example, we have predicted the turnover of establishments of a large restaurant chain.

Just like this use the Data Science applications are extremely numerous and remarkable power when they are increasingly executed.

Temptation 5: Interact in real-time

This is certainly one of the most interesting killer-apps Big Data for Digital Transformation. The ability to ingest and process the data to interact on all digital media, and in real time.

This opens up an infinite scope: adaptation of websites in real time according to the browsing behavior and our knowledge of or visitor, push targeted promotions on the best channel, interaction with the visitor physical outlets, etc.
From a technical point of view, technologies such as Spark or Flink and Lambda architectures allow to find an open-source answer to this temptation.

Tentation 6: Bring intelligence to the heart of business processes

This is my most exciting views of Big Data temptations. I had already mentioned this in a previous article.

Big Data can place the data at the heart of all business processes, it is called micro-data-driven decisions.

Previous temptations showed that Big Data and Data Science help provide intelligence and responsiveness to decisions. Best of all, Big Data technologies have a native ability to integrate operational information systems (ERP, CRM, etc.). Indeed, these technologies come from the world of the web and often the Java language. The interfacing via webservices on enterprise SOA architectures are actually easy to achieve.

Temptation 7: Pay Less

One (already) old adage “Big Data is a supercomputer within the reach of all.” We already talked about the supercomputer appearance. What is interesting for our 7th and last temptation is the second part of the phrase, “within the reach of all.”
Structural operation of Big Data technologies is to be based on ordinary hardware architectures (x86 machines) and an open-source OS (usually Linux). This helps to dramatically drop the cost of infrastructure. In addition, many open-source software (including the unavoidable Hadoop) and thus make it possible to drastically drop in the cost of licenses.

The only temptation is also often the primary motivation for use of Big Data technologies. Even without implementing new things, things we can do yesterday at a lower cost (especially for storage and calculations) … This is not it tempting? …