Dell's Data-Hungry Leader
Schmidt is a big data geek if ever there was one.
"I'm an IT guy. I love IT," he admits. "And man, if there's data out there, I want it. I want it because I know I can drive value out of it somewhere."
He possesses a techie's genuine appetite for information. But that appetite is tempered by a corporate leader's need for value. The result of that mixture is a data system uniquely arranged to capture and record as much information as possible while simultaneously putting it to work toward capital growth as fast and as efficiently as possible.
That system, based on a Teradata architecture, runs analytics across the company's vast business network from engineered suites by Teradata and SAS, but also through business-oriented programs running through the open-source Hadoop platform.
The result is a complex, custom-fit system that has now run, tracked and processed over 17 trillion transactions. And that is certain
ly enough to nail in the "big" of Dell's big data work.
But that part doesn't bother Schmidt.
"The size of the data doesn't matter," he says. "We could record every single point if we really wanted to. That's not the issue."
"The hard part," he explains, "is finding the right data to collect; the hard part is knowing how to apply it to drive the most value."
And that point strikes at the heart of the biggest big data concerns in 2013.
Data, Data Everywhere
"Storing data, recording data is cheap today. It's easy," explains Radhika Subramanian, CEO of analytics solutions provider, Emcien. "Now data is everywhere, everyone has data. It's like dirt."
According to Subramanian, in all the hubbub as the phrase "big data" passed through its hype cycle last year, no one stopped to consider that the data part of big data isn't really such a big deal.
"Data itself is useless," she says. "Nobody really wants more data; nobody wants another chart, another graph. What they want is a system that tells them how to do their jobs better." And that, she says, is the real issue at this point in the evolution of big data. It isn't about getting more data necessarily, the real concern is about driving intelligence from the data you have -- about making that endless supply of information into something actionable, something you can put to work.
"It's about intelligence," she argues. "People need systems that will turn their data into an action that they can go do."
