Hadoop Summit 2014: Organisations are only analysing 12 per cent of their data - Forrester

'Cold data' is just sitting in traditional data warehouses, says Mike Gualtieri

Organisations are only analysing 12 per cent of their data, according to Forrester Research analyst Mike Gualtieri.

Gualtieri was presenting Forrester's recent research at the Hadoop Summit 2014 in Amsterdam today.

He told Computing that much of an organisation's data was not being analysed because it was just sitting in traditional data warehouses, and that this was essentially "cold data in an expensive storage solution".

He suggested that organisations should use both traditional tools and Hadoop to analyse more data, in order to tackle a key new expectation of customers: to be treated as individuals.

About two-thirds of organisations surveyed stated that customers expected to be treated as individuals - this was the most common selection made by the organisations surveyed.

Gualtieri called this expectation the "royalty" trend, and suggested that new technology such as wearables could play a big part in helping organisations to better assist their customers.

In one example, Gualtieri said that if someone wore a Nike FuelBand and then visited The Cheesecake Factory to eat, the restaurant could obtain the data from Nike to alter its menu for that particular person, to suggest items they could eat with the same or less calories than the person had burned during their workout.

According to Forrester, the problem many organisations face is that they have created data silos that obscure profit-making opportunities and this places biases on certain outcomes. And this is where Gualtieri believes Hadoop comes in.

"Hadoop allows you to gather all of your data and breakdown siloes, but it is also a framework for processing that data. I would call it the first data operating system," he said.