The benefits that applying analytics to data has long been understood. But generally the big data solutions we’ve seen thus far have been targeted towards broad horizontal opportunities (the entire sales process or marketing automation for example). It’s interesting to see a tightly focused vertical application of big data analytics.

As analytics companies have brought a series of offerings to market, sales forecasting has come into sharper definition. You can use analytics in a couple of ways, and in forecasting the differences are important.

Analytics is indisputably one of the most important mechanisms for maintaining a competitive edge in today's technologically advanced marketplace. Unfortunately, any analytical process is only as complete as the data from which it is derived—and this data is only accessible when it is in a useable format. Historically, converting unstructured text into analyzable data has proven to be a challenge. Yet for the enterprise, the results are likely to be well worth the investment.

In a world of big data, insight is king. And whether it’s detecting the likelihood of fraud from millions of credit card transactions, giving businesses useful insights into their customers, or pinpointing distant galaxies from a mass of astronomical data, one IT discipline is becoming an increasingly bright star: data mining.

Big enough for DCIM

Now that data centers are a critical business asset, building management and IT systems management teams must pay close attention to managing the facility with fast response times to problems and changes.

Consultant Wayne Eckerson says Hadoop 2, with its key YARN component, qualifies as a flexible big data operating system. And it could quickly take the open source framework into the IT mainstream, he predicts.

Consultant Rick van der Lans contends that data warehouses are inherently logical and don't need to be qualified as such. What really matters, he says, is that they present an integrated view of enterprise data, no matter where it's stored.

IT recruitment expert Matt Mueller suggests that data management professionals amp up their big data skills and experience in order to stay competitive in a swiftly changing industry.