Suarabh Suri, Senior Director, Solutions & Services, Big Data & Predictive Analytics at UST believes the biggest markets in India for Big Data Analytics would be government, B2C and Financial sectors. In a candid chat, he talks about the trends, opportunities and challenges that Big Data is bringing in.

Trends in Big Data

There is huge data boom happening today. Years ago, terabytes of data was hard to get but today the same can be collected in a matter of days. And this data generation is happening from all over the flex. Its not the organizations alones but with Internet, Social Networking and connected devices, data boom is beyond anyone’s imagination. Today, it is all about Big Data.

Although it has been of critical use to tech giants such as Google, Yahoo! and Facebook for number of years now, it is only now that it is permeating into enterprises or the business domain. As per a study by McKinsey, a retailer using big data to the full could increase its operating margin by more than 60 percent. Harnessing big data in the public sector has enormous potential, too. If U.S. healthcare were to use big data creatively and effectively to drive efficiency and quality, the sector could create more than $300 billion in value every year. Two-thirds of that would be in the form of reducing U.S. healthcare expenditure by about 8 percent. In the developed economies of Europe, government administrators could save more than $149 billion in operational efficiency improvements alone by using big data, not including using big data to reduce fraud and errors and boost the collection of tax revenues. And users of services enabled by personal-location data could capture $600 billion in consumer surplus.

Similarly, five years ago if I wanted to mash and process the terabytes of data in different velocities, some in real time and some in near time, would have to spend millions of dollars in terms of infrastructure, licenses and others. Now with commoditized hardware and thanks to the cloud and cloud computing along with open source software Hadoop, it has become financially viable to process the ridiculously large amount of data. Because of the commoditization of the hardware and the falling cost of having the ability to parcel this kind of data, we see small and medium businesses adapt and adopt this technology quickly and challenge the established players. And that has bound the industry into itself, both in terms of end products to consumers, and in terms of services the people are provided leveraging the big data and the analytics that sit on top of big data.