EMC believes that its latest enterprise technology has the ability to truly unlock the promise of Big Data.

Speaking recently at IDC’s Big Data and Business Analytics Forum 2014, Servaas Venter, country manager for Southern Africa at EMC, said Big Data has moved from being purely a concept to a reality that is available to any business today. “No longer is the conversation about merely the data itself – it’s about how everything around that data is changing, how you’re handling the explosion of data across the organisation.” Whether or not an organisation embraces it, Big Data is changing the industry within which it operates, he adds.

Speaking alongside Venter at the event, IDC’s Country Manager for South Africa, Andries Lombaard, noted the rapid changes in recent years in the volume, velocity and variety of data entering the organisation. “This is enabling information-driven decisions – not just for executives at a strategic level, but for every level of the organisation at tactical and operational levels as well.”

EMC’s Venter referred to examples such as Uber: the mobile app-centered taxi company taking the world by storm. Overlaying social data and geospatial data, Uber tracks where taxis are, and picks up consumer behaviour in real-time – connecting the closest driver to customers. “This is a very clever use of data; and because of this, Uber is quickly becoming a market leader in a very short space of time.”

Third time lucky 

EMC refers to this paradigm shift as ‘the 3rd platform’ of IT architecture. The first platform, which started about 50 years ago with the migration of paper-based processing to mainframe terminals, gave way to the second platform – LAN-based traditional client/server enterprise architecture. “Now, we are entering a new era,” explained Venter. “The third platform heralds massive changes in application development. Web-scale, object-oriented IT is being delivered, drawing on the latest in the fields of Big Data, Mobility, Social Media and Cloud-based architecture.”

IDC’s Lombaard said research indicates that 83% of South African corporates recognise that Big Data has the potential to power better decision-making. “Depending on the organisation in question, the benefits are multifold – improving dialogue with customers, re-developing products, customising solutions in real-time, reducing maintenance costs, enabling better data security, and many more.”

But how to capitalise?

To capitalise on these opportunities, EMC pulls together all of its subsidiary assets into unified client propositions. The core business of EMC is complemented by Pivotal (SAAS developers), RSA (security specialists) and VMWare (providing the hypervisor and virtualisation stack). The latest iterations of EMC’s Isilon, VNX and VMAX ranges are joined by XtremIO – a flash-array offering unprecedented application performance simplicity – and making Big Data a reality. “Today it is possible to managed 90 petabytes of data with, let’s say, half an employee,” noted Venter. With the right technology, the organisation can start to identify opportunities to leverage Big Data, redeploy IT staff to address any skills gaps, decide which new data sources to integrate, and meld the Big Data framework into existing security policies.

Ultimately, the organisation evolves to the point of complete business process re-engineering, Venter explained, adding that this process remains fluid as the company continually innovates and stays agile.