Turning Big Data Into Business Context With SAP HANA Vora Posted on : Sep 03 - 2015

Theoretically, in this world of big data, analytics and mobility, your employees and customers should be able to access the right information, at the right time, on their device of choice. I call this delivering right-time experiences. Other firms call it contextual services or moments. Yet, as we’ve acquired more data, we’ve moved farther, not closer to creating contextual services that deliver the right information at the point of need.

Companies have more information than ever before with mobile, sensor and social data. More information represents both opportunities and challenges. Companies need to store and process large volumes of heterogeneous information, but IT also needso deliver actionable insights to business users from this wealth of data.

While we have the technologies to store and process data (frequently referred to as big data tools), there’s no single easy way to do this across the various data sources. Hadoop was once considered the holy grail for this, but after several years we’ve seen the need for advanced solutions such as Apache Spark, an open source big data processing framework built around speed, ease of use, and sophisticated analytics.

To deal with the challenge of analyzing distributed data (that includes systems of record and engagement as well as data from other sources such as social sentiment, sensor data etc.), companies are now moving vast amounts of data back to specific locations that are frequently called data lakes — soon to become archipelagos. What’s needed is a way for companies to effectively and quickly combine and analyze information from various sources. View more