By now it’s become fairly clear that big data represents a big shift in the enterprise technology landscape. IDC estimates that the amount of useful data worldwide will increase 20x between 2010 and 2020, while 77% of the data relevant to enterprises will be unstructured through 2015.1 As these volume and variety trends continue, companies are increasingly turning to Hadoop, NoSQL and other tools to tackle information issues not readily addressable with older relational database and data warehouse technologies.
Though the big data opportunity is growing rapidly, research indicates that the top two big data challenges that organizations face are determining how to get value out of big data and defining a big data strategy, respectively.2 In light of these challenges, this piece intends to identify and explain big data use cases generating business results for companies today and shed light on emerging use cases expected in the near future. The following pages, address what these use cases are, why companies are investing in them and their common reference architectures.
