MANILA, Philippines – The Internet may seem to be just a large number of websites containing different types of content to the average person. But for international computer technology company Oracle, it is a vast ocean of data that could be vital to a business.
The large amount of information being created in the Internet from various sources such as social networking sites, blogs, news sites, etc., is known as Big Data.
It is a large volume of information that is created extremely fast and coming from a wide variety of sources, said Kaleem Chaudhry, Regional Director for Enterprise Technology of Oracle Asia-Pacific, during the launching of their Big Data Appliance.
Sundar Ram, Vice President for Technology Sales Consulting of Oracle Asia-Pacific, said in a statement that many companies throughout the world “are faced with the challenge of acquiring, organizing and analyzing this enormous amount of digital data to make better business decisions.”
Oracle’s Big Data Appliance is “a complete, easy-to-deploy solution for acquiring, organizing and analyzing Big Data,” it said in their statement.
“It is designed to deliver extreme analytics on all data types, with enterprise-class performance, availability, manageability and security,” Oracle said in a statement.
Using Big Data, companies can monitor trends and patterns in the online world, and they can make relevant business decisions to take advantage of such trends.
Among the examples Chaudhry gave for the uses of Big Data was in the retail industry business. He said that if a retail store’s sales go down, the management can look at their transaction records to try to see why people are not buying products, but they won’t be able to get much analysis out of their information because they are looking at past data.
Big Data will be able to go through current data in social media and networking sites to see if there are complaints or bad reviews about certain products that translates into lower sales for the retail business. It will also be able to analyze data on whether certain products are in demand in the market but the retail business does not have in their store, Chaudhry said.
Big Data also has potential benefits to the insurance sector, financial and banking sectors, telecommunications sectors, etc., where large amounts of data need to be analyzed.
In the telecommunications sector, Oracle’s Big Data Appliance can be used to analyze thousands of calls to determine the quality of the call service, Chaudhry said.
Many factors can be analyzed simultaneously to generate vital information, such as reasons for calls being dropped, that will help the company to take action and quickly resolve issues, Chaudhry said.
“To make the most of Big Data, organizations are now looking at evolving their Information Technology (IT) infrastructures to handle the rapid rate of delivery of extreme volumes of data, with varying data types,” which can then be integrated into a company’s data in order to get the vital information it needs, Oracle said.
The “Digital Universe” is expected to grow 44 fold from 2009 up to 2020, Oracle said citing the study from a leading industry analyst firm. It added that 95% of the data is semi-structured, meaning it comes from websites where users are generating the content, it said.
The Big Data Appliance is a server computer that comes in a full rack configuration of 18 Oracle Sun servers with a total of 864 gigabytes main memory, 216 Central Processing Unit cores, 648 terabytes of raw disk storage, a 40 gigabyte per second Infiniband connectivity between racks, and 10 gigabyte per second Ethernet data center connectivity.
Its software is composed of Oracle’s server applications such as Oracle’s NoSQL Database, Cloudera Manager, Apache Hadoop, etc.
Cetin Ozbutun, Vice President for Data Warehousing Technologies of Oracle, said that their Big Data Appliance, along with its accompanying software technologies “offers the broadest, most integrated product portfolio to help customers acquire and organize diverse data types, and then analyze them alongside existing enterprise data to discover new insights and make the most informed decisions.”