Influx

There was a time when data was a passive thing; it took time to look through and by the time you had done the analysis, the world had moved on and it was kind of outdated. With advances in computing power, we are now about to enter a new phase in which data, instead of being a component of dusty old reports, is the new gold of business advantage. The faster and more powerful your computer and servers, the faster it can crunch and analyze the data and therefore the quicker you have real information you can act on.

If you take data from multiple sources, look for correlations and key patterns that takes computing power, but if your computers are fast enough, and they are now, you have something.

Here’s John Webster on Cnet talking about IBM’s recent acquisition of Netezza.

“But,
beyond the short-term tactical aspect of the Netezza acquisition is a
longer-term positioning of IBM that is far more significant. Traditional
data warehousing–as a relatively slow process that depends on
reiterative data extract, transform, and load (ETL) processes–is
essentially dead. What customers are now looking for is speed to
information. These appliances offer the ability to parse large data sets
from multiple sources in a nontraditional ETL way and to produce
information in real or near real time.

Posted by Ed Cotton