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The Aptitude Blog

What does it mean to be big data?

October 23, 2014
Posted by Sarah Werner

We would all agree that there has been too much hype about Hadoop, and despite our processing performance credentials, in time’s past, we have distanced ourselves from the multitude of new “BIG DATA” applications.For many of our large enterprises customers, many of the hyped ‘big data’ applications, such as analyzing Twitter feeds, aren’t yet moving the needle when it comes to achieving higher profits. Replacing existing infrastructure, such as relational databases, with new ‘big data’ technologies is also often far from feasible.The good news is that big data is moving beyond the hype.

The conversation about big data is no longer the sole domain of technology enthusiasts; we see pragmatic enterprise business leaders starting to recognize how ‘big data’ approaches can reduce costs, speed the time to insight and provide flexibility required to implement new business models.

For example, a leading retail financial services customer is using Apache Hadoop in conjunction with existing data warehouses to handle the massive volume of data & calculations necessary to dynamically calculate the profitability of customer groups. And we see companies like Spotify using Apache Hadoop-based infrastructure to manage operational calculations, including royalties owed to artists and record labels.

IT’S WHAT YOU DO WITH DATA THAT MAKES IT “BIG”

Forrester Research recently stated that “technical-only definitions about big data’s characteristics (volume, velocity, etc.) don’t cut it anymore”, providing a new definition for big data:

The practices and technology that close the gap between the data available and the ability to turn that data into business insight.

Source: Forrester Research, Inc. – ‘Q&A: The Top Five Strategic Big Data Questions‘ 8 July 2014 by Brian Hopkins, et al.

Aptitude Software is Big Data

Under this new definition of big data, we believe Aptitude Software is about as big data as is gets! Here’s how our enterprise customers are using the Aptitude™ platform to unlock value from big data:

  • Efficiently designing, developing and deploying data-driven software systems to unlock business insights and speed the time to extract business-critical information

  • Implementing big operational, ‘system of record’-type applications that manage massive amounts of transactional data. Big data is not just adhoc analytics or B.I.

  • Leveraging all major big data technologies, including in-memory, in-database and in-Hadoop processing technologies via a single platform

  • Accessing all of your data from across the enterprise, without the need to move data from data warehouses, RDBMS, ERP systems or other data stores

  • Maximizing the return on investment from your existing big data infrastructure. Aptitude Software partners with Teradata, IBM and Cloudera to deliver software that runs on your big data hardware

A leading analyst firm recommends that any big data strategy should be tied to uses cases and business goals. The Aptitude platform excels at efficiently addressing business requirements, while providing the capability to integrate, process and control massive volumes of data. That’s pretty big to us.

Learn more about the Aptitude platform and our new partnership with Cloudera.

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This blog post was written by:

Sarah Werner
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