Diverse data sources boost business

Employees whose companies have yet to adopt big data analytics may wonder where big data comes from and what separates the data-driven haves and have nots. Big data's secret is that the information comes from anywhere and everywhere, with sheer variety one of the trend's defining features and one of the sources of its utility.

Describing big data usage cases for IT Business Edge, software industry insider Prasanna Venkatesan stated that modern tools can leverage unstructured data from sources such as blogs and social media, as well as internal data from the call center and the company's stores of structured information.

Making sure this data come together, according to Venkatesan, is a job for modern database technology such as Hadoop, where sources can combine to form an actionable picture of a particular business problem.

Hadoop has seen increasing support during the past few years as companies have gone in search of storage technology for their vast reserves of data. According to InfoWorld, the original function of the system was caching web pages – it was adapted into an analytics tool by companies with large information sets that they were previously unable to store and use.