Data Opportunities for the next century

As the resources are becoming scarce and the demands are increasing, the future is dependent of optimal utilization . Data becomes the key ingredient to any effective decision making. The opportunities are immense and It is very much foreseeable that Enterprises will invest in harness the data capture and analysis to make them successful.

Data forms the key ingredient to any effective decision making. It allows for correct analysis - 

Data: The Data should be relevant for accurate analysis. With the advent of Social Networking Sites, we have opened the flood gates for information - which till early part of this century were confined to enterprise premises. There is a deluge of information all around. Now the issues for this type of Information are twofold.

•     Unstructured - Unstructured data - the data from news feeds, tweets, Facebook comments, Images etc. The acquisition of Radian6 by Salesforces.com, Yammer by Microsoft , SAP JAM are a key indicator as there is an attempt made by the industry to utilize these data, understand them and put it to business use. 
•     Large Volume - The Amount of Data generated is growing at an exponential rate within enterprises. The Data generated will be precious for decision making - soon the systems which were designed to handle the existing system will face a road block to process the data (both to write and analyze the data to the database). With more volume comes the complexity of analyzing the data. Since the Human evolution to 2003, 12 exabytes were added to the system. 12 exabytes of data would have been added in the last 12 hours. The entire leading organizations are investing new upcoming technologies for unraveling value from this immense amount of data. The concept of Big Data is in place and companies are coming with innovative software to make the data to be easily processed and quickly analyzed. SAP's HANA, Oracle's Exalytics, IBM's Hadoop framework etc are some of the relevant examples.

The opportunities of data to benefit the mankind are immense. There are numerous place where we see a synergy - highlighting the two areas out of the innumerable possibilities:

•      Imagine a social distribution system based on analytics. We can identify the core need of particular areas and channelize the resources. We have seen a subscription based model work in Software  - Why not have it governance. We have 120 billion people with each specific category - With Data available and analyzing the spending pattern, we can subsidize the items, have a variable benefits on items based on their usage pattern, quantity and demographics. The outcomes of analysis can open up an equitable economy where the benefits are appropriately passed to the citizen. Definitely, several progressive economies such as ours are thinking about it and ADHAAR is an initial start in the right direction.
•      HealthCare: Research on Genomics generated huge amount of data. Analysis of these can result in cure of diseases, check epidemics and cost effective medications. It can find its application to check the spurious medicines proliferation  - possibility is numerous which the data provides.

Man reached moon with computers which had less processing power than my laptop. Now with high speed processing and evolving technologies, we are at better position to process this data and make this world "RUN better".