The Big Data Manifesto

Providing effective business analytics tools and technologies to the enterprise is a top priority of CIOs and for good reason. Effective business analytics – from basic reporting to advanced data mining and predictive analytics — allows data analysts and business users alike to extract insights from corporate data that, when translated into action, deliver higher levels of efficiency and profitability to the enterprise.
Underlying every business analytics practice is data. Traditionally, this meant structured data created and stored by enterprises themselves, such as customer data housed in CRM applications, operational data stored in ERP systems or financial data tallied in accounting databases. But the volume and type of data now available to enterprises — and the need to analyze it in near-real time for maximum business value — is growing rapidly thanks to the popularity of social media and networking services like Facebook and Twitter, data-generating sensor equipped and networked devices, both machine- and human-generated online transactions, and other sources of unstructured and semi-structured data. We call this Big Data.