Big data explosion holds new pie for techies

The Economic Times - October 28, 2011 -- After Gary Kasparov found the IBM Deep Blue computer making a mockery of his status as the world champion of chess in 1997, this must have been the most exasperating moment for mankind: IBM Watson, an artificial intelligence computer system capable of answering questions posed in natural language, beat Jeopardy! champion Ken Jennings earlier this year to score another victory in the machine-versus-man contest. The latest victory of man-made machine over an individual human brain is seen by the industry as a harbinger of opportunities on the 'big data' front. "The explosion of data is considered to be growing at a rate of an additional 5% of all previous data, every month. Considering that all businesses are attempting to use multiple sources of data and crunch them for most efficient utilisation of the same, big data analysis is going to be a big-time opportunity for tech companies", says Arun Narayanan, COO of California-based UST Global. IBM Watson, named after the company's first president Thomas J Watson, beat two leading champions of the quiz show, Jeopardy!, Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings earlier this year to bag the first prize of $1 million. Narayanan says big data crunching is considered most relevant for the retail and pharmaceutical sectors, both of which face huge data sources and need to finally zoom in on core findings that can mean either providing the right satisfaction level to a customer or cure for a patient. "In the modern competitive situation, anything that a company does, including its internal communication, has to be analysed to measure its impact on a customer. This is what is going to provide relevance to corporate actions in future, as against the present culture of merely focussing on top line and bottom line analysis and performance appraisals", says Narayanan. He says the opening up of opportunities on the big data front comes at an opportune time, considering that cloud computing is just taking off. "For a country like India this is a good time to focus on big data opportunities. For sectors like meteorology, space science and even the tax department, big number crunching is of crucial importance for relevant information management and eliciting useful information", says Narayanan. For B2C companies, Narayanan feels big data crunching presents a different proposition since they need to break from traditional data crunching which focussed on plain vanilla internet information and instead focus on social media, particularly on opinion and discussion sites. "Since customers are unique, the traditional method of targeting a particular category will not work any more", says he.

Source: The Economic Times