MUMBAI, INDIA:  According to Stephen Brobst, Teradata Corporation’s chief technology officer, there is a huge growth in information data, especially in recent years, and in the next couple of years there will be a transition from exabyte to zettabyte age.

“The fundamental difference between exabyte and zettabyte age is that in exabyte age, we collected transactions data, for example bills, however, in zettabyteage will be about the collection of interactions, for example every click and every search that lead to purchase,” Brobst says.

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Every industry is now on a transition mode, from transactions to interactions, which will lead to a huge data explosion. And, as we move to zettabyte age, it throws-up many technology challenges, such extreme data compressions, he explains.

Brobst also points out that despite the growing importance for big data, there is a lot of confusion and misunderstanding in the market about the very term - ‘big data’. It is considered to be just big volume of data.

“However, big data is much more than just the volume. It is about the diversity and variety of data that includes velocity, volume, variety and complexity, which comes from not just rows and columns of structured business data, but also from click streams data on websites, micro blogs, Facebook posts and others leading to big data complexity,” he adds.

Many people strongly feel that social media is a big data. However, Brobst argues that social media is a good example of big data, however, there is a sense that data is much more big data, which is collected by enterprises across industries such as retail, automotive, telecommunication, supply chain, Internet and others through sensor devices such as cell phones, GPS, black box in vehicles, shopping cards, credit or debit cards and others.

Such huge sensor data have high complexity, volume, velocity and variety, making big data analysis challenging. However, these collected big data helps enterprise to create new products and services using analytical tools, such as business intelligence (BI) and consumer intelligence (CI).

According to Brobst, Teradata’s analytic data solutions and technology platform allow strategic BI to move into operational BI and bring intelligence into the value chain.

“The reason we acquired Aster Data early this year was because we believe that big data marketplace is going to be very important. It is relatively small today, however, we believe it will grow leaps and bounds in future. Our goal is to extract value from new data, deliver new high value analytics, increase agility, analytics and productivity to enterprises. Big data should not be technology driven, but business driven,” Brobst concludes.