In a panel on Big Data last week at Cognizant Community I cited several examples from the New Florence blog collected over the last few years – National Hurricane Center, Union Pacific, U of Washington’s ENCODE project, Social Media analytics and several others
In my recent book, Charles Zedlewski of Cloudera cited several of his customer scenarios:
- Electronics manufacturers can store and analyze usage data from
the devices they ship so as to understand product issues in the
field. - Financial institutions are constructing more elaborate fraud prevention models.
- Pharmaceutical companies are cleansing and processing vast
amounts of genomics data. - Retailers are building machine learning models that predict individual customers’ buying preferences and make recommendations.
- Media companies are analyzing viewer data to optimize the content
they present.
In his recent book, Rick Smolan brings out many applications all around the world.
Tom Raftery, in a recent blog post, provides several other examples from Europe.
The long and short is these projects have been on-going for years, if not decades, and are spread across industries and processes. They may not call their projects “Big Data” but their results are surely impressive.
Against this backdrop, I see so much marketing of the concept from IBM, SAP, Deloitte, Infosys and others. You would think the pioneers above have been using their tools and their talent for years now. Have they? I hope prospects look at a broader list of success stories , not just the references the vendors show them.
Even more, I hope customers do not accept the excuse “the concept is so new, nobody has references” or the proposition that customers should sign up for their MDM, change management and a variety of other products/services they push as “essential” for Big Data success.
