Big data? We're still in 'the playground', say users in V3 survey

But organisations will quickly shift from playground to production, argues Pentaho's Wael Elrifai

Almost one-third of organisations are still in "the playground" when it comes to big data adoption, according to a survey conducted by Computing's sister publication V3. The results of the survey were revealed today in a webinar sponsored by business analytics software company Pentaho.

However, organisations "playing" with big data today will quickly shift applications to the real-world as soon as they see applications that can provide value to the business, according to Wael Elrifai, EMEA director of enterprise solutions at Pentaho.

"It's about building a technical capability," he said, "because they will, in time, move from the playground section to mission critical over time."

But they need to turn it into "value" quickly, argued Nick Millman, managing director at Accenture Digital. According to Millman, almost four-fifths of Accenture customers believe that big data would quickly become mission critical, and not just as a replacement for, or advance on, business intelligence.

"For example," he said, "BP Fuels and Convenience Retail are using big data applications to get a better understanding of customers and customer needs... Big data is not just reaching a tipping point, it's already 'tipped' in many ways. Many organisations are now starting to try to catch up with the early adopters."

A lot of projects that Elrifai is involved with at Pentaho, he says, are still at a version 0.5 or 0.6 level - but are not far off going live, if not enterprise-wide, then at least in front of key decision-makers.

Indeed, while 29 per cent of respondents regarded big data as a playground for techies, half - 49 per cent - saw big data within their organisation providing mission-critical functionality for decision making.

Yet the survey also painted a mixed picture in terms of how far down the road organisations really are. Just under half - 46 per cent - admitted that their organisations hadn't even started yet, compared to two per cent who claimed to be at "the bleeding edge" of big data. A significant number - 16 per cent - had deployed the infrastructure but were still at the experimentation phase.

But intriguingly, one quarter of respondents suggested that they hadn't done anything in big data that they hadn't been capable of doing with a standard infrastructure backed with a relational database.

Pentaho's Elrifai pointed out that, while it's perfectly possible to run analytics applications on an RDBMS, big data is about scale and cost. "Value comes from data 'blending' and the scale that you can bring to bear" on a big data infrastructure, he said.

This morning's V3 webinar kicked off V3's Big Data Summit, in association with Pentaho and Liaison Technologies. Running from 3rd to 5th November, find out more here.

Computing's Big Data Summit returns in March 2016. To find out more - and to book your FREE place - sign up here