Big Data is being touted as a big opportunity for the channel to make mega bucks. Should you jump onto the bandwagon now or adopt a cautionary approach?
Recently, Gartner has declared 2013 as the year of Big Data after a global survey. The hype around Big Data is slowly giving way to real-world implementations, and industry experts expect this trend to accelerate further in the coming years. In this context, it is important for the channel to get a grip on what it really means and how they seize the opportunities in this space.
Big Data is still in the early adoption stage, and some select verticals in the Middle East such as airlines are already in the process of running PoCs. It may not be an immediate business opportunity for resellers but it is imperative for them to understand the Big Data phenomenon and also invest in the right technologies to cash in on this trend.
“Big Data is currently one of the key IT discussion points among Middle East businesses and being able to manage and extract value from Big Data is certainly becoming an increasingly important objective for them,” says Abdullah Al-Swaha, Director, Partner Organisation & Commercial, Cisco.
Fadi Yousef, Managing Director, Axeldata Systems, agrees that the Big Data market in the region is in the early stages of development. “Organizations are starting to realize that there is tremendous benefit that can be obtained from collecting and analyzing unstructured data. Furthermore, combining unstructured data with structured data is opening doors for better insight that can have immediate effect on company profitability and long term competitiveness. Moreover, after many years of growth, organizations in the Middle East are starting to struggle with the volumes of data they have to deal with, and they are starting to question whether traditional approaches are enough to help them solve the new challenges of volume, velocity and variety of data.”
He expects the uptake to accelerate as companies start to understand how new technologies can help them. “There are already customers here that are either in advanced stages of Big Data technology adoption or undergoing proof-of-concepts for particular use cases.”
This has attracted the attention of many Big Data vendors and a case in point is Teradata. “We see many opportunities for Big Data here, especially in industries such as telcos, oil& gas, banks, utilities and logistics. Companies that do have various technology platforms and solutions will benefit more from an unified architecture before embarking on Big Data implementation. The Middle East has this advantage because the companies here don’t have much legacy, so can move faster towards Big Data,” says Eric Joulie, VP-Western Europe, Teradata.
Should you bite?
Like their enterprise customers, the channel recognizes the potential of Big Data. However, says Al-Swaha, the main barrier to selling Big Data solutions is that the channel is still learning and trying to grasp the opportunities and the tools available.
“Traditionally it has taken longer for resellers and their customers to understand the cost and efficiency benefits from pioneering technology solutions. This was certainly the case when cloud computing entered the market and Big Data is no different. The channel need to work more closely with the right technology vendors to be educated about the vast benefits for their customers in adopting Big Data solutions – such as improving performance and market execution; creating customer centric organizations; mitigating risk – and how to effectively sell these solutions,” he adds.
Yousuf from Axeldata believes the main challenge associated with Big Data solutions is the lack of skill sets in the region. “At the end of the day, Big Data technologies work, but what is more important is what useful insight can be obtained through the use of those technologies, and this aspect is more relevant to customers. For this reason, we at Axeldata Systems have been very careful to fill this gap with the right skill sets that can speed up the adoption of Big Data solutions and can address customers’ main business issues.”
The opportunities around Big Data for resellers are many and it is very important for partners to figure out which aspect of Big Data they want to play in. Al-Swaha says the Big Data explosion has given rise to business intelligence data mining and analytics spanning market research, behavioral modeling, and inference-based decision. “Resellers have an opportunity to help enterprises address the Big Data challenge with a new set of software and solutions. The greatest opportunity for the channel lies in providing consultancy to enterprises on how to address business problems by tapping into the potential of Big Data. The channel could elevate itself to becoming true partners of enterprises,” he adds.
It’s also a good idea for partners to keep an eye on the most talked about Big Data solutions coming out of the oven this year. “Some of the hottest topics right now are in-memory analytics and SQL-on-Hadoop. In-memory solutions enable real-time data exploration on large volumes of data, and SQL-on-Hadoop is a response to customer feedback that will ease the adoption of Hadoop within traditional enterprise environments,” says Yousuf.
Joulie from Teradata says the vendor has recently unveiled its in-memory technology, dubbed Teradata Intelligent Memory, which manages the data in this new space by predictively placing the most frequently used data into memory, and then automatically updating and synchronizing it.
Should the channel act on Big Data now, or else wait for the market to mature a little? “With information growth exceeding Moore’s Law, the average enterprise will need to manage 50 times more information by the year 2020. With this in mind, Big Data offers the channel a new and lucrative market potential. The channel has an opportunity to identify organizations that are technology early adopters and to help these organizations to unlock the potential of Big Data, even in the smallest way possible to make savings and deliver operational and competitive advantage,” sums up Al-Swaha.
