The Peaxy Executive Summary Series is designed to explain quickly and simply what business leaders need to know about big data and data access systems.
The world is being “datafied” and the result is Big Data—too large, complex, and dynamic for conventional data tools to capture, store, manage, and analyze. For background on why we are now generating such a staggering amount of data, see our previous post, What is Big Data?
WHAT KINDS OF PROBLEMS CAN BIG DATA SOLVE?
A broad range of them, across several industries:
Finance
Credit card companies use Big Data methods to detect irregular purchase patterns that may indicate fraud. Brokerages use similar methods to detect securities fraud.
Publishing
Every day, publisher Penguin Random House sifts through 10 million sales records to recommend how many copies of each book its vendors should order, based on previous sales.
Oil and Gas
Phenix Energy Group is building a set of pipelines, tank farms, and deepwater ports to transport crude oil from one coast of South America to the other, providing a quicker and less expensive alternative route to move oil from the Caribbean to China and Japan.
About 30,000 sensors along the underwater and terrestrial pipelines will report flow, pressure, and temperature data in real time. Along with video, audio, and human observation, the data will enable detection and correction of leaks, slowdowns, and potential hazards. Transmission delays of any kind can cost the company as much as $1 million an hour. “We’re like a railroad: You can only pull so many cars with the train,” explained the COO. “So it’s how well we pack the train and how quickly we get it out of the station on both ends that determines how effective we are.”
Medicine
A visualization from the MIT Health InfoScape project , which has uncovered surprising connections between medical symptoms.
MIT Health InfoScape and GE have analyzed data from over 7.2 million anonymized electronic US medical records to uncover hidden associations between symptoms and conditions. The results are providing new insights into disease classification, with potential ramifications for treatment and public health.
A neonatal intensive care unit generates a live stream of its babies’ heartbeats and looks for patterns. The system can detect infections 24 hours before a baby would show any visible symptoms, allowing early intervention and treatment.
Transportation
GPS information from our phones, tracking where they are and how fast they are moving, is now used to provide live traffic updates.
Consumer Goods
Supermarkets are combining their loyalty card data with social media information to detect and leverage changing buying patterns. For example, retailers can predict that a woman is pregnant based on her changing buying patterns. They can then send her promotions for pregnancy and baby products.
WHAT CAN BIG DATA DO FOR MY COMPANY?
Big Data can open up new analytical opportunities that were previously infeasible. For more details and some suggested next steps, see our upcoming post, Big Data Opportunities.
WHERE CAN I LEARN MORE ABOUT BIG DATA?
See our posts on Big Data Challenges and Big Data Opportunities. We also recommend these resources for a deeper dive into Big Data:
- What the heck is … big data? by Bernard Marr on LinkedIn
- Volume, velocity, variety: What you need to know about Big Data by O’Reilly Media in Forbes
WHO IS PEAXY? WHY ARE YOU TELLING ME THIS?
Peaxy software empowers universal data access for enterprise – so you can save, find, analyze, manage and reuse your data – whenever it was created, wherever it is located. Our Executive Series is designed to help to get you up to speed quickly on the key topics related to big data and data access. Because the more you know, the more you’ll prefer Peaxy.