Early Adopters Innovating around Big Data Analytics and Unstructured Information

June 15, 2011

Early Adopters Innovating around Big Data Analytics and Unstructured Information

At the recent MarkLogic Users conference, the surprise was how many business executives, not just trailblazing IT developers, attended to try to get ahead in the competitive advantages in Big Data Analytics.

By Ken Bado, MarkLogic

Two or three years ago leading-edge people in IT organizations came to MarkLogic’s User Conferences. They were doing things that were ahead of the wave. This year I noticed a lot of high-level business people – of course CIOs, but line-of-business leaders also participated. “Big Data Analytics” is a hot topic, and there is an acceleration of interest on the business side in how to get their arms around the explosion of unstructured information in their companies. Using software solutions to manage big data and unstructured information is growing into the business mindset as organizations are beginning to understand that they need to leverage it for competitive advantage. Users from the business side of companies and agencies at our conference were exploring how to get in front of that competitive advantage

Unstructured data (e-mails, PDFs, Word documents, PowerPoint, Excel, images, videos, etc.) represent more than 80 percent of the data people create every day, and it’s growing exponentially. The question at an enterprise or a government agency is how to access and analyze it effectively. The reality is probably only 10 percent of that is required. But the question is: which 10 percent and how do you do apply it to solve the business problem?

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