What is BIG Data and its Scenario in India

BIG Data is the next happening technology around the world and i thought it is must for all Startups to keep abreast with the latest stuff to keep innovating and another reason is my fascination for BIG data that forces me to write about it. NO i am not suggesting that it is a new thing in India, in fact will give you some amazing instances where BIG Data helped to achieve BIG results.

To make it look simple, lets just start with Analytics, we all know analytics is analysis of the data like how many and from where all people visited your website, for a small website the daily data may vary from 1GB to 50 GB. The more advanced for this kind of analysis can be sighted as CRM -Customer Relationship Management which stores more information about the people who are visiting your website. To know more about CRM you can read all our previous articles here https://www.startupfreak.com/tag/crm-for-startups/

OR just imagine Facebook which is having more than 900 million users, and these users have their own profile consisting of  photos, videos, posts, notes and pages. Now if you want to make some meaning out of this data(for say-how many user from each country) then some analytics has to be applied and storage of this data has to be assigned. This is BIG Data.

What is BIG Data

There is no specific measure to define Big Data but it is usually in terms of Petabytes [10¹⁵ bytes ] and exabytes[ 10¹⁸ bytes] of data. Of course Big data is associated with Cloud Computing as such big data cannot be store in single server but has to be distributed in tens of thousands of Servers. Big Data analytics is used to uncover the patterns and make a meaning full observations about it and apply the same for Business Intelligence and to have a competitive advantage over the rival companies.

A new class of big data technology has emerged and is being used in many big data analytics environments. The technologies associated with big data analytics include NoSQL databases, Hadoop and MapReduce. These technologies form the core of an open source software framework that supports the processing of large data sets across clustered systems.

BIG Data Indian Scenario

Though India is not yet having a great internet penetration but its growing at a steady pace.

As per a report by EMC and IDC, India alone generated nearly 40,000 petabytes of data in 2010. “It is estimated that India’s share of digital information will grow 60 times by 2020, driven by the roll-out of 3G/BWA networks, digitisation of television networks, government services like the Unique ID project, Census, among others,” the report said.

You may ask who is using BIG Data in India? Answer is there are many but most popular Satyamev Jayate used it for the success of its TV Show in May 2012. 

On the day of first episode of  Satyamev Jayate, 1000 of engineers were waiting behind the scene to capture all the data that will be created on Facebook, Twitter, Mobiles and websites/blogs etc. about the opinions on the show and to find out what category of people from where and how many positives and negatives were throw out into social media. The producers of the show wanted to use this data to improve future episodes. 40,000 tweets came within 90 mins of the show(Read more).The results were aggregated and then further used for creating visualizations and dashboards.

According to McKinsey Global Institute report, five key areas with maximum Big Data potential are healthcare, public sector, retail, manufacturing and personal location data.

Recent example of usage of Big Data analytics is the discovery of the Higgs Boson particle or the ‘God particle’.

“Scientists had to analyse more than 800 trillion proton-proton collisions to look for the ‘God particle’, which would not have been possible without the advances in Big Data research and capabilities,” EMC said.

IT solutions provider EMC said the big-data analytics market in India, which it expects to more than double to around $680 million by 2015 from $320 million last year, presents a huge opportunity for the company(Press Trust of India).

I hope you have got the Big Picture of Big Data, and i request you to keep Big Dreams as well 🙂

(Image Presents the result of Poll by Hindustan Times. Image Copyrights HT Media. Link to Poll Results Infographic)