The good news is that this creates an opportunity for channel partners. “The opportunity is in changing the mindset of customers who think they are too small for a data analytical solution,” Behan says. He agrees that Big Data can help partners to “to unlock genuine information around their own customers, allow customers to make informed decisions quicker and increase customer engagement. The ability to give customers this control over their data and give them the tools to make decisions quicker is a huge opportunity for any partner”.
“..up to 90% of data in the future will be in the machine and human categories, most of the tools are focused on the business data” – Robert Youngjohns, HP
Partners with the capability to help customers capture, store, manage and analyse data will be able to develop closer relationships and arm their customers with “better insights to make informed decisions”.
Peter Trevaskis, enterprise marketing manager at Dell Ireland, agrees that conversations about Big Data might always define volume as a key factor and discuss the need for massively parallel systems to interrogate the data, but things are moving rapidly to the smaller scale. “Many vendors offer solutions that scale down as well as up, particularly Intel, Microsoft and SAP,” he explains.
In-house skills
He says there is an opportunity for channel partners, especially if they have a “lighthouse customer and the opportunities are definitely growing for the smaller scale customer. The real opportunity for the partner is customers will not have the resources to take on-board fully, the new technology and methods so this is where the channel can develop the business”. The fact that Hadoop is an open source product is also significant because channel partners have the opportunity to work with multiple customers to develop their own in-house skills and reapply those skills to the market. Trevaskis adds there’s “a natural evolution” from working with customers on data analytics to start developing Big Data methodologies.
Crawford says many companies have foreseen the huge need for Big Data solutions and have invested in research and development around them and the required analytics skills. They have worked closely with partners like IBM to try to provide maximum value to customers.
“Many are developing proof of concepts and solutions for diverse industries that combine structured and unstructured data for analytics,” he notes. “This wealth of knowledge by Business Partners around structured and unstructured data analysis is helping customers to discover unknown patterns in their data and take corrective measures at the right time, using analytic platforms such as IBM InfoSphere BigInsights and IBM InfoSphere Streams.”
Murray comments that many partners are very well prepared for Big Data platforms but are quite happy to limit their value proposition to the delivery platforms appropriate for a particular organisation’s size and requirements. The platforms can be onsite, in the cloud or a hybrid of both. Projects can be born in the cloud and moved on-premise or vice versa.
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