Companies Look to the Cloud and Outsourcing for their Big Data Projects

Organizations of all sizes are increasingly taking on Big Data projects.  A recent report by GigaOM and sponsored by Logicworks investigated what motivates these organizations to use Big Data and the challenges these organizations face when they take on Big Data projects.

The report found the following to be the main motivators for initiating Big Data projects:

• Better forecasting (72 percent)
• Less uncertainty in decision making (51 percent)
• Better competitive positioning (66 percent)
• Improved customer retention and satisfaction (60 percent)
• Better internal communications and strategy (54 percent)

Kenneth Ziegler, CEO of Logicworks, said that “Organizations are spending more time and money deploying and keeping big data architectures up and running than actually using the data to make better decisions.  By leveraging specialized cloud environments, clients can reallocate these resources to monetize their big data investments.”

The report emphasized that many organizations lack the appropriate skill sets among their employees to successfully take on Big Data projects.  It noted the following:

• 74 percent of Business Intelligence projects are still being let by IT departments
• 45 percent say the main reason BI projects fail is lack of skilled data analysts
• 61 percent of organizations are investigating the outsourcing of Big Data projects
• 70 percent of organizations that do outsource Big Data projects prefer to work with cloud vendors like Amazon or Rackspace rather than an IT vendor like Microsoft or IBM

How companies can better prepare themselves for Big Data? - The GigaOM report suggests that companies hire skilled data scientists, begin training their existing staff, and come up to speed on SaaS Business Intelligence tools.

Source: formtek.com