The Growth of Big Data Analytics & Insight

By Barton Goldenberg

The term “Big Data” refers to ‘data-driven, tactical decision-making derived from large data volumes coming from a variety of sources (e.g., transactional, Social Media, mobile devices, electronic transactions, etc.).’

The growth in Big Data over the past few years has been explosive.  At the end of 2016, this growth of Big Data was estimated to reach $53.4 billion, which is a 10-fold increase in 5 years.  This impressive growth is being driven in large part by (1) decreasing costs for both data storage as well as data analytic tools and (2) a new business model for generating and consuming data.  Regarding the latter, under the old model a few influential 3^rd party data aggregators like Experian or Acxiom gathered financial, demographic, behavior and lifestyle data and then sold this data to organizations for their internal consumption.  In recent years, the model for data collection changed in that organizations began to generate, collect and analyze their own customer data.  Organizations then purchased what is referred to as ‘data overlays’ from 3^rd party data integrators, whereby:

• The organization provides their customer data to the data aggregator.
• The data aggregator overlays this customer data with additional demographic, behavioral and lifestyle data about each customer.
• The data aggregator provides the data-rich, customer file back to the organization for analysis and ultimately customer engagement purposes.

This new model puts the power of data analytics and insight back into the hands of the organization.  The impact: more and more data is being generated, collected and analyzed as evidenced by these sobering statistics:

• Wal-Mart handles 1 million transactions per hour.
• Google processes 24 petabytes of data per day.
• AT&T transfers 30 petabytes of data per data.
• 90 trillion emails are sent per year.
• Every hour, Internet traffic consumes data = 7 million DVDs.
• More data produced in past 2 years (3.5 sextillion) than in all history.
• By 2020, 1/3 of all data will be stored/passed through the cloud and 35 sextillion bytes of data will have been created.

In my next blog post, I will discuss several case studies of organizations applying Big Data successfully within their business environment.

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Barton Goldenberg, is the founder and president of ISM Inc., customer-centric strategists/implementers serving best-in-class organizations globally. As a CRM leader for 30 years, he was among the first three inductees in the CRM Hall of Fame. Recognized as a leading “customer-focused” author, his latest book, The Definitive Guide to Social CRM, is hailed as the roadmap for Social CRM success. Barton is a popular speaker on “maximizing customer relationships to gain market insights, customers and profits”. He is a long-term columnist for CRM Magazine and speaker for CRMevolution and frequently quoted in the media.