Petabytes and exabytes, zettabytes and yottabytes -- this is the new vocabulary of the digital age. It's an age in which over 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created every day -- an age that requires a whole new lexicon to describe, calling up prefixes usually reserved for counting atoms or stars.
See Also: Manufacturing Industry Technology News & Trends
As IBM figures it, some 90% of the data that exists in the world today was created within the last two years, born from sensors recording every turn of every engine, every tick of every machine, every tweet and every Facebook "like." It is the byproduct of a world in which everything is recorded, everything is searchable and permanent, where no detail, however minute, is missed.
This is the age of information -- the age of big data.
As we enter it, it's clear that neither life nor business will ever be the same. And already, manufacturers who have found the new alchemy of turning data to value are recording record profits and climbing to new heights of productivity.
The Next Big Thing
The big data wave struck the world in 2012, shooting the term to the top of the pop culture buzz list and to the top of the to-do lists for every IT manager in manufacturing. Since then, it has inspired a kind of digital revolution in manufacturing that has savvy, data-driven leaders climbing to the fore. As they do, data is quickly becoming the new currency of capital investment.
"CEOs and CFOs are used t
o looking at their physical assets, their plants and trucks and buildings, for returns," explains Keith Henry, vice president of global industry solutions, manufacturing at Teradata -- a data warehousing and analytic technology provider.
But focusing on those assets is an outdated mentality, he says. The new way to capital gain is through refocusing on big data and big data analytics and letting them steer the enterprise.
"This is the next great productivity breakthrough," he says. "But it's not going to be easy. It requires a new breed of business leaders in manufacturing brave enough to apply capital to big data and analytics to show the world how it works."
Luckily the industry has just the hero it needs for this task: Rob Schmidt, CIO of business intelligence at Dell (IW 500/20).
