For its part, HP has developed its HAVEn (Hadoop, Autonomy IDOL, Vertic, Enterprise Security and apps) Big Data platform which, the vendor claims, is the “first comprehensive, scalable, open and secure platform” in the industry. Recently, the vendor made HAVEn available as a service as a means of overcoming some of the challenges and complexity associated with Big Data.
Martin Risau, senior vice president for analytics and data management at HP Enterprise Services describes the move as designed “to meet the dire needs of a solution capable of handling all types of data, regardless of size, type or location within the enterprise. He described HAVEn As-a-Service as “the most complete cloud-based Big Data platform designed to support enterprise customers with their discovery and production needs”.
“[Organisations are] still struggling to understand what Big Data is and how to get maximum value from it” – Martin Risau, HP
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In June, Risau told Forbes.com that organisations were “still struggling to understand what Big Data is and how to get maximum value from it”. There were clear benefits from having well-managed data because it delivered the insights businesses needed to make faster and better decisions. “Poor information management leads to higher cost and greater risk, inefficiency and lost opportunity,” he warned.
Challenges
Whatever the challenges associated with big data, the results speak for themselves, says Murray. “Once one previously unachievable business insight is delivered, it creates multiple more demands,” he claims. The big opportunity for channel partners is “being capable of bringing clients on that journey, knowing the initial milestones that need to be achieved to reach what I might call the ‘aha’ moment, and then being capable of moving the client forward to the next steps on this journey”.
Crawford at IBM takes a very similar view. The process of helping customers to get smarter about their business decisions requires partners to “be able to convert data into useful insights using analytics so that their clients can shape where they’re taking their business”.
In addition, they need to be “be ready engage in discussions on analytics and big data across business units like marketing etc, not just with the IT departments”.
This requires them to have a greater understanding of what analytics and Big Data are and be able to explain to customers that if they are embedded in every part of a business, they will realise more value and opportunity over the coming 12 months. “At a service level offering this means being able to provide skills across Big Data solutions such as capturing, storing, searching and analysing structured and unstructured data from multiple sources and combine these with teams skilled in various analytics technologies.”
John Behan, cloud, software, MSP manager at Exertis, agrees with Crawford that Big Data is relevant to any manner of organisations but wonders if many of them don’t realise it. “Big Data is important to every business whether it’s SME or enterprise,” he states. The problems is that the ‘Big’ in Big Data has had an impact on the adoption of solutions because “customers think they are too small to even look at solutions when in fact all businesses have the requirement to manage their data”.
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