Businesses can develop new revenue streams with big data

BEIJING, CHINA: During the HP World Tour, Mohan Krishnan, VP and GM, TS consulting, enterprise group, Asia Pacific and Japan, HP, talks about big data. Excerpts from an interaction with Deepa Damodaran of CIOL:

CIOL: How can businesses benefit out of big data?

Mohan Krishnan: Big data is anything that is large and complex. The concept of big data is very new. It has opened up new opportunities for people to analyze the existing data in a company.

No data is useless. Information that is not yet analyzed is called 'dark data'. If you can analyze, it makes some sense out of it. Consequently, businesses can make targeted demand generation and develop new revenue streams.

CIOL: What are the opportunities in India for big data?

Mohan Krishnan: India has always been the software powerhouse. The ability to develop consumer applications is significant in India. There is huge opportunity for enterprises. Telcos, banks and to an extent, the government sector, are at the forefront in adopting big data. As the government starts adopting, it will become more pervasive.

In India, we are seeing a lot of consolidation of storage and Hadoop, and selected deployment of Autonomy. It has started to ramp up. The major adopters are Japan, Australia, Singapore and Hong Kong.

CIOL: Why can't traditional analytical tool do predictive analysis?

Mohan Krishnan: Traditional analytical tools perform in the area of structured data, such as Oracle databases, SQL databases from Microsoft, SAP, etc. However, not much has been done on the unstructured data front, such as powerpoints, blogs, videos, e-mails, etc.

Unstructured data is growing three times faster than structured data, and today, 80 per cent of data is unstructured. HP uses Hadoop to create a semi-structured data plane on which we can deploy a tool like Autonomy to extract information.

CIOL: Are these tools reliable, which will enable making decisions based on those?

Mohan Krishnan: It depends upon various factors such as the power of the tool, how the query is applied, etc. Businesses should look at meaning-based search and also do several filtering so as to get the results they seek. Outcome-based pricing or revenue sharing can be the future of big data. It is still based on the capex model and not opex.

CIOL: What are the challenges when it comes to big data?

Mohan Krishnan: There are four challenges: volume, variety, speed and security. Variety and security are the toughest. You have legacy technologies that can hamper data analysis, and at the same time, securing these data is also a huge task.

Mobility and cloud are enablers of big data. Today, 20 per cent of the IT budget is spent on storage. In future, half of it may be spent on big data.