The Era of Big Data is Upon us!

No kidding - if you didn't know this already, read this article from The Economist - Data, data everywhere.

Here are some mind boggling stats from that article:

• Wal-Mart handles more than 1m customer transactions every hour, feeding databases estimated at more than 2.5 petabytes—the equivalent of 167 times the books in America’s Library of Congress.
• Facebook is home to 40 billion photos.
• Decoding the human genome involves analysing 3 billion base pairs—which took ten years the first time it was done, in 2003, but can now be achieved in one week. (May be few hours now with SAP's HANA)

Another interesting insight The Economist:

Only 5% of the information that is created is “structured”, meaning it comes in a standard format of words or numbers that can be read by computers. The rest are things like photos and phone calls which are less easily retrievable and usable. But this is changing as content on the web is increasingly “tagged”, and facial-recognition and voice-recognition software can identify people and words in digital files.

So, what does this all mean? Opportunity for incumbent companies which offer software tools to analyze world's structured and unstructured data. Companies like SAP, IBM, Oracle, Informatica of the world find themselves in the eye of the storm. This is the decade of big data and enterprise mobility that means big opportunity for lot of software and hardware companies.

I will be publishing blogs on the topic of Enterprise Mobility and Mobile Business Analytics going forward and will be looking forward to collaborating with other visionaries out there to spread the word on Mobile Business Analytics.

So Long!