Guest Contributer: Andrew Ettinger, Director, Sales, Greenplum
Let’s face it, we live in a different world today. I am sitting here on my Mac computer, with my iPhone out, my iPad is in my briefcase, I am answering email on both my phone and computer, I am surfing the web from paying a credit card bill, to fantasy football, to reading the technology news on LinkedIN (great content in this feature), to responding to a friends note on Facebook about the lack of moves the Chicago Bears have been making in the free agency market, all in a matter of minutes!
I have been up and online since 6:30 am and it is 9:50pm right now, have used my AMEX to pay for a client breakfast at the Hyatt for $43.28 and have sent 20 text messages to my colleagues during the day – to name a few more events.
Who cares you may ask? The point is that I know all of this detailed information about myself because I live in a different world, a world that has recently changed as drastic as the Industrial Revolution did. We live in a world in which we have access and the ability to obtain, store and analyze unprecedented amounts of data that changes our lives and the world as a whole.
The world in which we live today thrives on information, they need it, they create it and they don’t stop at all hours of the day. It is just too easy to consume. This has created the Big Data Era and the need for Big Data Computing to be able to process and make sense of this information in ways that were not possible before. For example, this drives value for the ultra competitive financial services industry looking for better online response rates, the identification of an “ideal” customer, understanding consumer sentiment online or identifying fraud in trading.
This extends to the front, middle and back office of trading firms looking to capture the proper levels of information to influence client behavior, trading patters and high frequency trading algorithms being run in real-time as well as on years of history. Many companies need to load data of what the future will look like to drive more effective models of their business.
I have had the distinct pleasure to work under a company led by Scott Yara the Co-Founder of Greenplum Software. He has often told a story that compares the Data 2.0 Revolution to when Steve Jobs was fired from Apple and he was searching for the “next big thing” in the industry.
Jobs essentially said that the intersection of so many trends converging at the same time is so rare that in order to make step function changes it took great timing of solid technology, good people and luck to truly drive change of this magnitude. To us, data is just that. It is that step function change in the industry that is as revolutionary as the PC revolution, the advent of the Internet and e-commerce and truly is having a profound and distinct impact on the world.
We believe that Big Data is interesting for all of these reasons and is certainly the new industrial revolution. In order to make Big Data deliver value, it must be aligned to the next generation analytics and computing platform. For a long while, computing power, storage, and network speed were bottlenecks to building an empire of data within the Information Technology sector. This is no longer true with software, commodity hardware and parallel computing. This helps to derive more value and insight from this data than ever possible before and financial services firms have the greatest opportunity to capitalize on this rare opportunity.
Let’s face it; we live in a different world today. A world driven by data. Embrace it. Analytics is the monetization of this vast amount of data. Embrace the 2.0 world or your competitive advantage will be lost.
Need a Reprint?
Leave a Reply