Embrace the Big Data Hype Date:   Wednesday , August 06, 2014 Undoubtedly, there is a lot of hype in Big Data. Nonetheless, billions of dollars in venture capital have been flowing into Big Data start-ups. In 2013 alone, venture capital funding of Big Data startups touched $3.6 billion where in nascent companies like Cloudera, Palantir, Mu Sigma, Opera Solutions, VoltDB, and 10gen leading the league. Though the current economy is in favor of Big Data, the space itself is in a nascent stage and the enterprises still need to embrace and execute the innovation of Big Data. To compete in the global market, the enterprises need to have a complete understanding of the market, customers, products, regulations, competitors and suppliers. This understanding demands the effective use of information and analytics. In fact, next to their employees, many companies consider information to be their most valuable and differentiated asset. Not every organization will need to manage the full spectrum of Big Data capabilities. But the opportunity to utilize new data, technology and analytics exists to some degree within every industry. For instance, verticals like media/communication, banking, services, education and healthcare seems to have the most amounts of Big Data programs while retail, insurance, transportation, utilities and government are still testing the waters. Much of the data generated by the enterprises in these industries are unstructured. To make good decisions, the managers need both structured and unstructured data. Moreover, the challenge is the accuracy with which the software can make sense of unstructured data. Today, organizations realize value by analyzing the volume, velocity and variety of new and existing data, and putting the right skills and tools in place to better understand their operations, customers and the marketplace as a whole. Though there are large number of upcoming players in Big Data, there are only very few innovative companies that understand the concerns of enterprises who turned the spending spigot on Big Data. In this issue, we have the story of ClearStory Data led by Sharmila Mulligan, CEO & Founder, A Menlo Park, CA based firm, who understand well about the enterprises concerns. ClearStory Data has carved a niche among the companies involved in the industry, within a short span of three years. Since 2011, ClearStory has made a smooth transition to the top, without ever moving from their objective of simplifying accessing, exploring and analyzing data.