HP’s Big Data Strategy for 2015

BW Online Bureau Dec 15, 2015

"Proper utilization of insights from big data helps businesses innovate around new ways to engage with customers and partners, new product ideas, and new pricing models," says Vivek Ratna, Country Director, Big Data Platform, HP in an exclusive interaction with BW CIOWorld on how HP is gearing up to tap into the big opportunity.

Do you think Indian businesses are data-driven already? Who are the leaders?
There is an increasing trend of Indian businesses becoming data driven. Start-ups across different businesses such as e-retail, matrimony, online/mobile advertisement networks, pure-play analytical companies, etc are at the ones who have taken the lead in extracting more value out of data for getting business outcomes. A significant number of HP’s Big Data customers are from this segment, along with large enterprises customers being from telecom and BFSI segments.

These segments have lots of data and they are finding ways of leveraging this data to get business outcomes in any of the four areas - increasing revenue, reducing cost, reducing fraud, and/or increasing customer service.

Big data analytics is a big problem for many businesses, especially banks and ecommerce players; do you think businesses have moved beyond storing data?
Frankly, for most of the organizations, Big Data means Hadoop. While Hadoop is a very important component in the Big Data world, most organisations stop at using Hadoop for storing huge volume of data, since it’s cheap. It is the first step of the Big Data journey but most organisations tend to stop at that.

As per a recent study by Gartner’s 2015 Hadoop Adoption Study, 49 percent of the respondents said that they haven’t figured out how to get value out of Hadoop.

What’s your advice for CIOs trying to draw actionable insights from their influx of data?
Big Data is a journey with a long term view and short term objectives. The long term view entails creating a platform with capabilities to take care of business needs of today as well as tomorrow. However, one is not certain of tomorrow, hence the platform should be as flexible as possible to take care of the needs of tomorrow. Many organizations like to go with technologies based on industry standards with huge scaling capabilities, rather than proprietary technologies to reduce their dependency on any particular technology or vendor and hence achieve more flexibility.

The short term objectives are the proof points of the platform capabilities. In this context the use cases become extremely significant. One can start with a couple of use cases with clearly stated business outcomes. The advantage of this approach is that one need not put a huge investment straight-away, but at the same time, the success of the use cases would energize the rest of the users and the management.

What are some of the hurdles for businesses when it comes to harnessing insights with analytics?
One of the reasons why organizations are not able to completely harness data with analytics is that businesses stop their Big Data journey primarily at the level of storing huge volume at low cost. For this they use Hadoop, which is very good for this objective. However, they tend to overlook the other aspects. For example, Hadoop is an IT system and one needs to know Hadoop language to take advantage of Hadoop.

Asking the business users to learn Hadoop will be a tall order, especially since the open source world keeps on moving so fast. This makes IT, as one of our customers told us, ‘data-hoarders’. Hadoop, traditionally works in batch mode. So, if one wants to use Hadoop for high concurrency, there will be performance issues, which will not help if one is looking at more and more business users to play with the data on a real time basis.

It is extremely important to have the right data architecture, so that the performance needs of the different stakeholders are met.

Big Data projects are never IT projects in isolation. Without the business buy-in and active engagement, the project is bound to fail. Many a times, the business teams struggle to come out with use cases having real business outcomes.

What will HP’s strategy be going forward in order to successfully tap into the Indian market?
HP’s focus is currently around enabling organizations to harness data of all types, including emerging forms such Internet of Things device data, leveraging important new open source projects, and providing developers and early stage companies with the tools they need to become successful, data driven organizations. For that, HP has unveiled a series of new products, services, and programs designed to help organizations leverage data and analytics to build new products and experiences, run more efficiently, and differentiate against the competition.

HP’s approach centers around the following: