Business outcomes - driving big data & analytics

The first subject we will address is the much hyped ‘Big Data & Analytics’ where today there are lots of articles and discussions on the technology surrounding it, with little focus on the business opportunity and how deep analytics of big data can increase customer care and product quality, leading to higher profitability, loyalty, and reputation and give the organisation potentially a major Competitive Advantage.

And it is not just commercial businesses that aim to prosper from Big Data & Analytics as according to IDC in their ‘Government Insights’ report ‘Western European government executives will invest first in Big Data methodologies and technologies.’ Silvia Piai, research manager, IDC EMEA Government Insights commented that “Big Data represents a cultural shift in how government organizations operate.”

Despite the optimism about the growth of government activity in this are the concern is that the report concludes that ‘government Big Data initiatives could fail to deliver adequate return on investment due to narrowly focused technical implementations that take into account only the volume aspect of Big Data and neglect variety and velocity’.

It is this issue of too narrow a focus on the technology that we plan to address during our Spotlight Session. If you look at IDC’s figures in their ‘Worldwide Big Data Technology and Services 2012 – 2015 Forecast’ they show that organisations spend for 2011 showed that 41.5% went on services, 29.7% on software and 28.8% on servers, storage and networking.Most observers believe that this percentage spent on services will rise quite substantially as organisations embrace the cloud to manage the scalability they will need to cope with the volumes of data and the different sources from which it is obtained.

During the session we will address the whole are of ‘Big Data and the Cloud’, and the practicality of running Big Data & Analytics within a cloud or hybrid environment. We plan to have case studies showing cloud deployments and the challenges and opportunities that represents and how organisations have prospered by such deployments. One of the most important topics we will address is ‘Completing the Loop’. How Big Data & Analytics is not a snap shot process rather one of continually improving data, analytics, processes, procedures and results. This is really where the Business Outcome is the most important factor and where the organisation
gets the pay back. Just as important for all directors and managers of European businesses is the topic of ‘Big Data and the Law’, the legal implications of what is stored, where it is stored and the responsibilities of user and datacenter/cloud owner.

There are new proposals from the European Union on data ownership, retention, usage and storage and we will look deeply into the implications of these proposals to business owners.

In taking this broad view of Big Data & Analytics we cannot ignore the implications on the technology within the data center. So we will be covering subjects such as designing Big Data storage infrastructures and how to address the processing and communications challenges posed by streaming data, social media data, multimedia content, M2M and mobile activity and events. At a software strategic level topics like Business Database Management: Dealing with Big Data and when to use columnar data warehouses, analytic appliances, Hadoop, and MapReduce for complex, big data workloads will be explored.

The overall objective of this Spotlight Session is to familiarise delegates with all the business and technology issues around Big Data & Analytics. Show the opportunities that this opens up for all types of organisations and give enough detail so that delegates can go back to the office with a much deeper understanding and ready to start their Big Data & Analytics projects or take their existing ones on to the next level.

If you would like to join in the discussion then register to attend
the ‘Powering the Cloud’ events. IT end user and channel partner
can register for free with promo code: P3M13 at
www.poweringthecloud.com

Most presentations will include Q&A and panel sessions where you can give your views alongside your peers. For those of you who would like to participate in the 2013 conference programs the ‘Call for Papers’ is open until 26th April. The organisers are looking for high-quality submissions from IT end-users, consultants, industry analysts and system integrators/VARs, describing case studies or technology update sessions that focus on real-world deployments and/or methods and best practices to evaluate new, existing or future solutions. Fore more information, please visit
www.poweringthecloud.com/speaker/information