Forbes’ contributor Christopher Versace recently talked with Opera Solutions CEO Arnab Gupta about how Big Data is perceived in business today — and where it’s going in the future. One of the more compelling questions was “Do you see a shift in how companies like Oracle, IBM, SAP, and others will have to conduct their business?” Arnab responds, in part, that “companies that have built their business on a notion that data is something that can be stored and warehoused — that data is a relatively static, structured, and inside-the-enterprise commodity — will need to rethink this. I don’t think that data warehouses are going away any time soon, but the market is shifting toward much lower-cost alternatives.” He expects Oracle and SAP will “absolutely” have to rethink and expand their capabilities. They’ll need to embrace a new paradigm with unknown and difficult new challenges — something large companies typically don’t do very well.
IBM is a leader in this regard, however, especially since it just turned Watson loose as a separate entity, effectively freeing it from the legacy infrastructure that could weigh it down. That’s the right mindset for Big Data. As a concept, Big Data is moving very fast; it’s constantly changing direction and taking on a life of its own — in the same way that the Internet did in the 90s and social networking did in the 2000s. Large, established companies are almost always last in keeping up with these changes, which means smaller companies (or smaller entities, like Watson) will likely be the best bet for investors and those looking to implement Big Data solutions into their organizations.
Arnab has a lot more to say on the Big Data landscape. Read the full interview here.