If you want to know what your customers really want even before they think about it, or if you want to pre-empt your competitors’ next moves, then you should be looking at big data for the answers. We live in a world where big data is available and doable. In the past, it was simply unthinkable to go through all your historical data and come up with business decisions. Unthinkable because it was very difficult to do and because it was very expensive as well. What most companies did was to get a representative sample and try to infer conclusions from that sample. But of course, sampling is fraught with errors and sometimes you do not have room for errors in your business.

With big data, you can now work with ALL of your data. Not only that, you could look at your data from a wider time range. You could easily get more accurate analyses and a better view of your customers, suppliers and competitors. What’s more, you could drill down and get detailed data on individual clients to personalize their experience with you.

You now have the technology to deal with big data and do it cost effectively. Cheaper computing resources and storage have paved the way for big data to become more and more mainstream.

Oracle is helping customers get into big data and roll out their strategies. How? First, it provides you with engineered systems such as Oracle Exadata that could help cut down the costs of storing, processing and moving data. For instance, Oracle has developed algorithmic caching behaviors that keep hot data at hand. Then the cold data, those which you are not using frequently or recently are moved out of memory and on to the storage disk. So you get to save on storage and get higher performance without you having to do anything at all.

Then you have all the other technologies that Oracle has, on top of the standards-based technologies that it uses.

As a business executive, you can use Oracle engineered systems and all the other technologies that you can only get from Oracle to boost your big data efforts. For one, you can take all your existing data and find a new use for it. For example, looking at your inventory data that you use to ensure that you have a more efficient inventory management system in place, maybe you could use that same data to get more savings from being able to assist purchasing decisions. Try to buy more at bigger discounts from your suppliers without unduly jacking up your inventory costs.

Then you can use Hadoop to combine your data with data reservoirs. This will help you get more insights out of the data that you have already collected.

So you see, with big data, it is not only about the data you collect and the insights it gives you. You could also compare, contrast and combine it with other data to see if there are connections, trends and more insights for you to discover.

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Photo by BTO.