Big Data: How Big Data is Changing Business

[Carding Forum]

The term Big Data has appeared relatively recently. At the same time, now this term is not used only by the lazy. In practice, you can come across various definitions of Big Data: just a large amount of data (more than 100GB), data that cannot be processed on one computer, and for some it is any data at all. But the most accurate definition of Big Data (from the English "Big Data") is a series of approaches, tools and methods for processing structured and unstructured data of huge volumes to obtain results that are effective in conditions of continuous growth, distribution over numerous nodes of a computer network, alternative to traditional control systems databases.

In 1981, Microsoft founder Bill Gates announced that 640 KB of memory would be more than enough for any computer. Today, three decades later, a modern computer barely has enough 2 GB of memory (which is 3.5 thousand times more than the predicted figure) to process the minimum data flow.

Data volumes are growing exponentially. Every two days we generate as much data as has been accumulated in the entire history of civilization up to 2003. Every minute, 98,000+ tweets are generated worldwide, 695,000 status updates, 11 million messages, 698,445 Google searches and 168 million emails are sent. This primarily affects the conduct of any business in the modern world. If earlier companies used structured data from internal sources, such as an internal accounting system (purchases, returns, attraction channels, address, warehouses, balances, partners), today, in order to make a profit, it is necessary to collect information from all available and inaccessible sources. , take into account external data that at first glance seem inappropriate.

According to Volodymyr Lyulka, Managing Partner of Intellica , who presented his report at the BigData Conference 2015 (September 11 in Kiev), companies must learn to process every byte of information in order to extract the most important business from Big Data - to be more efficient, to satisfy customer requests, reduce risks and scale the business. According to Vladimir, the figures and the technical side of the issue are of little interest to businessmen. The main thing for them is to reduce risks, increase efficiency and increase profits, which, in fact, can give Big Data.

The speaker also gave several examples of big data applications in banking, telecoms and e-commerce.

Vladimir spoke about such Big Data tools in the field of telecommunications:

• Real Time Decisioning Marketing based on customer behavior - the customer, on his own initiative, contacts the company through one of the points of interaction. This can be a call to a call-center, authorization on an Internet portal, etc. On the basis of this interaction, certain decisions or recommendations for working with a client are developed;
• social networks as a channel of information about customers, connections among themselves, as well as TextMining - a technology of deep text analysis, which allows using algorithms to identify previously unknown connections and knowledge in text data. “With the help of text mining, we identify trends and those dependencies that will help to use information for monetization,” says Vladimir Lyulka;
• social networks as a channel of marketing communications - allows you to highlight "opinion leaders";
• alternative communication channels (Viber, Skype, etc.);
• geo targeting is a method of providing unique content and / or services based on the precise geographic location of the user. Geotargeting is very actively used in internet marketing to place targeted advertisements. Location parameters include factors such as countries, provinces, cities, zip code, IP address, and more. “For example, a customer often approaches an ATM that is a partner of his mobile operator. Accordingly, it is possible to track when he comes to the ATM of this bank and propose to perform some action in this particular ATM, for example, to replenish the account", - Vladimir Lyulka gives an example.

Observing the latest market trends, one can conclude that the use of big data analysis has also led to a revolution in the banking industry:

• development of "virtual" banks without branches that carry out transactions via the Internet or mobile applications (Simple, Moven, Rocketbank);
• staff cuts and branch closures due to the growing popularity of remote services (a striking example is the British Barclays);
• migration of users to the digital environment.

Experts assure that Big Data is not the solution to all problems. It is just a tool that can and should be used. But if used correctly, big data can bring great added value to a business.