The Big Data Opportunity

By: Monica Ricci

It is only natural that when Communications Service Providers (CSPs) think about “Big Data” stemming from their traditionally network-centric viewpoint, that their first thoughts are of the network.  For many CSPs, Big Data means the need to manage extreme growth in subscriber data usage, carefully manage investments in expanded capacity, and ultimately find ways to process network records more efficiently to ensure that potential revenue leaks are plugged and profits maximized.

But Big Data is both a challenge and an opportunity that is receiving increasing focus across nearly every industry.  And, many of these industries – health care, the public sector, and manufacturing to name a few – could hardly be called “network-centric.”  Yet the need to collect, interpret, store, share and gain increasing insight from data is common to them all, and CSPs would be best served to think outside the network when it comes to assessing Big Data strategies and the benefits that these can deliver.

How Big is Big?

To understand the implications of the rapid growth of CSP network utilization across multiple dimensions, it is natural to begin by putting some quantifiable metrics around Big Data.  To do this, let’s first turn to the experts for guidance on how you might measure Big Data’s size.

IDC predicts that the market for Big Data solutions – which includes networks, servers, storage, systems and services – across all global industries is growing at almost 40% annually. They forecast this market to reach nearly US$17 Billion in spending by the year 2015.  Most importantly, this growth rate is 7 times that of the overall IT industry.

Others, including Forrester and Frost & Sullivan, use a common framework to describe data as “big” if it measures excessively in at least one dimension of Volume, Velocity or Variety.  These dimensions are called the “3 Vs” of Big Data.  

• Data record volumes must be growing rapidly – and we know this is to be a key concern for all CSPs, –
• or they must be collected and processed with increasing speed – that’s the velocity, –
• or they must represent a growing number of transaction types – that’s the variety