When big data can lead to big profit

"Big data is not just about buying databases and software. It is also about how to use it commercially to grow the business," says Phillip Beniac, regional vice-president of QlikView, a Pennsylvania company that provides big data services.

QlikView has about 27,000 customers worldwide, including King.com, the developer of Candy Crush, the popular smartphone game. King.com has more than 40 million players and more than 3 billion games played every month globally.

Beniac says that by using QlikView solutions and the Apache Hadoop-based big data system, King has been able to develop rapid insight into customer behavior. Apache Hadoop is an open-source software framework used for storage and major processing of hardware data and is one of the most preferred big data applications.

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Managing big data in a complex economy

"We use QlikView for explorative purposes when the data extraction and the transformations are designed and verified from the big data," says Mats-Olov Eriksson, director of data warehousing at King.com.

"The rise of Big Data has led businesses to believe that they need 'data scientists' to leverage this new raw material immediately," says Terry Smagh, vice-president, sales, for Southeast and North Asia at QlikView.

Big data should be understood as an emerging trend that encourages business users across an organization to analyze and make discoveries in the data through intuitive and exploratory technology, he says.

Data discovery helps all employees to make a more informed decision easily - employees, even without special skills, can spot anomalies and hidden relationships that have never been seen before, such as understanding user behavior more thoroughly, discovering new business models and improving competitive edges, Smagh says.

"The power of data discovery lies in its ability to liberate data via visualization as much as build a compelling story for business users," Beniac from QlikView says.

Head start

The US has a head start in data development. In March 2012, the Obama administration announced it was investing $200 million in big data projects to advance scientific research in areas such as healthcare, energy and the environment. In China, however, the concept is still in the early stages.

"While some leading-edge customers in China are using big data in production, most of the others are still in the trial stages. However, there is a huge interest in this technology and I expect rapid adoption in the coming years," says Sundaresan from Microsoft.

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