Big Data = Big Opportunity

Big Data is running wild, and everyone is noticing.  Peter Sondergard, SVP of Gartner Research, notes, "Intelligence about Information is the Oil of the 21st Century.”  He couldn't be more right.  The data about Big Data speaks for itself.  Corporations are producing 60 percent more data every year, and 80+ percent of all data is unstructured and, therefore, hard to find and use. Data comes in many more forms, too.  It's not just e-mail and Office documents; it's also video, social networking posts, mobile data, and a host of data types stored in SharePoint.

To combat the Big Data explosion, corporations are spending wildly on software products that treat the symptoms of Big Data problems.  By 2014, the US market for Big Data point software products is projected to exceed $9 billion, but problems will remain:

• Data growth exceeds the ability to process, deliver, and analyze information.
• Solutions are silos – not integrated – meaning that it’s very difficult to find the right information hidden in the data.
• Hidden costs are huge in hardware, services, human capital, and productivity. Spending on services is 2-3x size of software market.
• Analysis and decisions are sub-optimal.
• With every terabyte stored, business risk increases, not decreases.

The bottom line is, when it comes to Big Data, there has to be a better way. Corporations need a unified solution for finding, capturing, organizing, packaging, and delivering relevant information to decision-makers.  

There are three companies that claim to turn Big Data into a Big Opportunity through a unified Information Management platform:

• EMC, which acquired an Information Management platform called Kazeon in 2009 and owns multiple Big Data management software products that can feed Kazeon.
• Autonomy, which provides a broad suite of Information Management capabilities under the catch phrase "Meaning-Based Computing."  Autonomy is the market leader with $1 billion in revenues chasing Big Data opportunities.  Now it's clear why HP would want to buy them.
• StoredIQ, a growing, Austin, Texas-based company, that does what Autonomy and EMC do with a more lean footprint and much more scalability.  StoredIQ is a company to watch in 2012.

So what makes an Information Management Platform successful and unique? The enterprise IM Platform combines elements from three, successful product categories to create a new set of capabilities that are needed and necessary in major corporations:

1. Like search engines (Google, Bing): The core of the IM platform is the ability to process vast amounts of data and turn it into relevant information that is delivered to users in a form that promotes effective decision-making.  Google delivers a list of relevant webpage results based on a proprietary algorithm, while the Platform delivers a package of documents (or document subsets) based on decision-maker defined criteria.
2. Like network switches and management software (Cisco, BMC): The IM Platform manages the transport and delivery of information based on a defined set of rules much like switches and routers deliver messages across voice or wide area networks.
3. Like enterprise Business Intelligence for structured data (Cognos, Business Objects, MicroStrategy): The IM Platform enables decision-makers to define their information needs and then processes unstructured data from many sources to deliver summarized, actionable information.

How do you know whether an IM Platform implementation is successful? There are three, important benefits:

1. Much lower business risk across the board. 
2. Substantially lower data management costs.
3. Dramatically improved insight into important business problems and potential opportunities.

At the moment, it's hard to pick the long-term winner in the Information Management Platform market; however, a few things are for sure:

• It will become an imperative for large corporations and government agencies to implement enterprise-wide Information Management strategies.
• IM Platform products have the ability to turn Big Data problems into IM strategies that create Information Intelligence opportunities.
• The market for IM Platforms is likely to be among the fastest growing in Enterprise Software for many years to come.