The Big Data Threshold

By Mike Farrar

IT consultancies are making tons of money scaring customers with questions such as, “How are you going to cope with the explosion of Big Data?” “What are your competitors doing with Big Data?” “Are you ready for a brave new world of Big Data?”

You can relax. Big Data does indeed offer Big Opportunities. It can be a source of competitive differentiation and efficiencies, and it can let you engage with your customers like never before – all leading to higher sales and fatter margins. But the fact is, Big Data is nothing new. Data has always been Big Data. Even back when it was (by current standards) small data, it was Big Data.

Gartner Group puts it well:

“Big Data” starts at the point where your current data collection and analytical paradigms fail to meet your needs.

In other words, data is always as big as our systems can handle. Big Data begins where our ability to deal with data ends. The threshold keeps climbing as our systems get bigger, better, and more powerful, but the threshold will always exist.

FICO has been pushing the boundaries of the Big Data threshold for decades. We understand its power and its challenges, and we know how to wring every last bit of value from it.

There will always be Big Data. Add storage clusters, add processors, throw data into clouds, do what you will – there will always be Big Data, and Big Data will always lie just beyond our reach. The challenge is not to manage Big Data. The challenge is to know how to work at the threshold.