Big Data analytics is being touted as the next investment area for the majority of enterprise organisations, according to a recent report by analyst house, Ovum. It announced that almost half of IT departments in enterprises in North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific plan to invest in Big Data analytics in the near future.
For many years now, organisations have relied on business intelligence (BI) to extract useful information from all the data they hold. However, the cost of BI technologies has been prohibitive to many organisations. In its place, a new form of technology has come to the fore – in-memory analytics.
In-memory analytics is comparatively inexpensive and also enables organistions to conduct quick – even real-time – analysis of big data and social media. Speedy analysis of vast amounts of data can give businesses a competitive edge, help them deliver a better customer service and enable more insightful and effective business decisions to be made. So, why are companies only now coming round to the idea of adopting in-memory analytics? There are three main factors driving interest this year.
Firstly, the cost of a RAM upgrade has dropped considerably. Since the RAM acts as a temporary workspace for the system’s processing, the more the RAM available, the more it can perform multiple tasks at once and respond faster to the demands of real-time analytics. Secondly, as the cost of memory hardware and chips drops, data volumes are reaching an all-time high. Companies need to find ways to process this explosion of data. In-memory analytics is one of the most effective options available to provide analysis of mountains of data. Thirdly, data velocity and variety is increasing and rapidly. In-memory analytics can manage data that both moves quickly and from multiple sources, much more quickly than traditional BI technologies.
While the benefits are clear, the question remains: when will the market move to in-memory analytics? We are asking just this question as part of a market survey currently underway. Watch this space for the results!