A Big Data future you could see coming

20/20 Team June 12, 2013

While it’s true that “the future belongs to those who hear it coming,” as David Bowie once said to promote a rock album, an even larger truth is that you can’t see the future clearly without also understanding the present.
Unfortunately most organizations lack the necessary tools to capture, manage and analyze the universe of unstructured and structured data produced both inside and beyond the walls of their enterprise. And once captured, few organizations know how to turn this data stream into actionable intelligence – while also protecting the data from uninvited guests.
What is this data stream that many organizations are unable to capture and analyze? “Big Data,” explains George Kadifa, EVP of HP Software, “is about every action that an enterprise creates and executes. All these actions generate digital footprints. And these digital footprints contain valuable information from both inside and outside the enterprise. This digital footprint can be anything from a 140 character Tweet all the way to a complete customer transaction on the Web. And Big Data is about taking these footprints and correlating them so we can get meaningful information. And that meaningful information will be used to change an outcome in real-time.”
That’s where HP’s HAVEn, the industry’s leading Big Data solution, comes into play. HAVEn is a technology stack that melds proven HP Software technologies from Autonomy, Vertica and ArcSight Logger with the Hadoop framework.
In a presentation Tuesday at HP Discover, Las Vegas, Kadifa explained that HAVEn helps organizations solve four major obstacles to implementing a viable Big Data solution:

• Volume of data. Legacy databases may lack the capacity to deal with multiple Petabytes of data, data that is complicated to ingest, store and analyze
• Variety of data. Consider the array of structured and unstructured information that legacy applications can’t process, which comes from disparate sources such as the Web, social media, human interactions and digital communications
• Velocity. Organizations need to be able to quickly analyze this data stream to make timely business decisions
• Vulnerability. Organizations must be able to secure this data and keep the valuable insights it yields away from uninvited guests.

Therein lies the opportunity to build a platform capable of seeing into the future. “Most of the tools that exist today are not well suited to expanding out to the edges of the big data problem,” says Robert Youngjohns, SVP, Autonomy.
Many organizations are just becoming aware of this opportunity – and the complexity of making it happen. “Currently today a very small fraction of digital footprints are actually being analyzed and leveraged in the enterprise,” says Kadifa.
To find out more about this new HP Big Data solution, check out this solution brief or visit the HAVEn page. Join Enterprise 20/20 as we take a look ahead at the future of Big data and unstructured data