Big Data

The term "big data" has been popping up all over the tech world in recent years. However, it has only recently begun to be accepted as an important concept for marketing professionals, who tended to be a bit more unsure of just how they could use big data to produce results. Thanks to the brave pioneers who blazed the trail, the union of big data and marketing has become much more accepted as a feasible way to make themarketer’s job easier while enhancing customer relations and improving profitability.

The term "big data" implies far more than just a lot of data. It is also more than just data sets that are too large for conventional tools to manage, analyze and capture. Big data gives you access to data that is arriving via new streams, such as data collected from social channels, devices connected to the "Internet of Things,"

Real-time data can provide many benefits to businesses as well as their customers. In the past, data warehouses could only provide information on past events, with the age of the data dependent upon the frequency with which the warehouse was updated. Real-time processing means that the data warehouse is updated continuously.

The volume of data that businesses can accumulate today is staggering. The information can provide a level of business intelligence that was only dreamed of two or three decades ago. However, a traditional data warehouse can only provide hindsight -- what happened a few hours ago, yesterday or (in some cases) last week. In a competitive economy, businesses need access to data as quickly as possible, and mastering real-time data is one aspect of making technology a strength rather than a weakness.