Ten 2015 big data predictions
It's that time of year again when we all look ahead in hopes of successfully predicting what's coming in the New Year. Here's a roundup of the 10 most recent big data predictions. Will they come true or not? We'll have to wait and see. But even so, there is good food for thought and discussion here.
I'll just put these predictions from various sources in list form to make them easier to read on smaller screens for you.
The term "Business Intelligence" (BI) will morph into "Data Intelligence." "BI will finally evolve from being a reporting tool into data intelligence that every entity from governments to cities to individuals will use to prevent traffic, detect fraud, track diseases, manage personal health and even notify you when your favorite fruit has arrived at your local market. We will see the consumerization of BI where it will extend beyond the business world and become intricately woven into our everyday lives directly impacting the decisions we make." -Eldad Farkash, co-founder and CTO at Sisense.
Mobile will force a fundamental change in the approach to BI. "When it comes to mobile BI, adoption has been shockingly poor because it doesn't usually work well with mobile devices. You can't read data in depth on a mobile device, but rather you need to get to the point quickly. With everything shifting to mobile, the approach to BI will change. Rather than elaborate visualizations, you will see hard numbers, simple graphs and conclusions. For instance, with wearable devices, you might look at an employee and quickly see the KPI (key performance indicator). The BI game is about to change--primed to go mobile this year." -Adi Azaria, co-founder of Sisense
Text analysis will take on a central role. "Unstructured data has posed many obstacles in the past, but will come into its own in 2015. Text analysis will gain increasing traction, with Web data, documents and images, with companies finally able to tackle unstructured data in meaningful ways." -Azaria
Cloud strategies will undergo a major makeover. "Enterprises are working through the hype that the cloud is a one-size-fits-all solution for any deployment. Instead, they are taking a workload-centric approach to determining their future cloud and big data strategies. As computer capacity and the ability to process and analyze big data expands, the possibilities are immeasurable. However, companies will need to ensure that their infrastructure's availability, performance and serviceability don't suffer as they take on more cloud and big data initiatives. IT departments will need to proactively monitor the health and performance of their infrastructure spanning both on-premise private and hybrid cloud deployments, and do so in real time." -John Gentry, vice president of marketing and alliances and Virtual Instruments.
Cloud loses its luster. "2015 will be the year that companies come to grips with the fact that the 'cloud' is no more a panacea than the Internet was back in the late 90's. In particular, there has been a lot of hope and a lot of hype about the cloud solving the big data problem. The main issue is that the public cloud is a terrible place to put your big data. In 2015, as companies are forced to come to grips with the previously theoretical problem of how to save their ever-expanding data, they will realize the serious security, performance, and cost issues with pushing data to the public cloud, never mind the problems with accessing or analyzing it. Scalability--without conceding high performance or affordability--will become paramount. While this change has been in the works, the pain just hasn't been severe enough. However, the dam is about to burst. In 2015, a significant number of companies are going to be forced to abandon the naïve answer of 'put it in the cloud' and explore new ways of managing their own big data." -John Hogan, VP of engineering and product management at Storiant.
IT pros and business executives will finally wrestle security issues to the mat. "Major organizations in the public eye saw security breaches and compliance issues rise over the past year, often resulting from issues with outdated data governance strategies that were unable to manage growing stores of dark data. However, if 2014 saw these organizations fall victim to such issues, 2015 will see IT pros and business executives alike take a proactive stance on data security, compliance and management, aided by technologies that meet the company's goals through careful assessment, protection, and monitoring of data at the core of the data center, at the point of storage." -Jeff Boehm, vice president of marketing at DataGravity.
Big legacy storage loses its grip on enterprise business. "Enterprises are increasingly realizing that they need to better match their business needs--scalability, performance and accessibility--with appropriate storage solutions to avoid paying for performance they don't need. While hierarchical approaches are becoming mainstream, the market is also embracing open solutions involving commodity hardware to a greater extent than ever before. In 2015, the tide will begin to shift in favor of those solutions that solve the challenge of exponentially growing unstructured data, rather than legacy systems that are grandfathered into the datacenter." -Hogan
IT is in for a beating from rising demand for analytics. "Tension on IT will mount as more and more users require analyzed data in their day-to-day activities." -Ajeet Singh, CEO at ThoughtSpot
Search becomes hot in big data and BI. "More BI providers will incorporate search into their interfaces to make the tools more accessible to average business users." -Singh
Impact on BI as Google Glass goes pro. "While Google Glass has not been embraced by the consumer market, it is starting to find a home with business applications for the technology. Police arresting suspects might have ID information projected in real-time or doctors might utilize it to review their pre-surgical checklist. This will have ripple effects in the BI world, as an increasing number of professionals will require key data points presented to them in short precise summaries, as opposed to lengthy analyses and dashboards chock full of statistics." -Azaria
