Oracle Introduces its Big Data Solutions Platform 

First vendor to offer a complete and integrated solution to address the full spectrum of enterprise Big Data requirements

Oracle today introduced its Big Data Solutions Platform to help customers tackle Big Data and make decisions faster. Oracle is the first vendor to offer a complete and integrated solution to address the full spectrum of enterprise big data requirements.

Oracle’s big data strategy is driven by its overall approach to data management with Engineered Systems in which hardware and software are engineered to work together for performance, reliability, and scalability.

Oracle’s Big Data Platform includes Oracle Big Data Appliance, which in conjunction with Oracle Exadata, and Oracle Exalytics offers the broadest, most integrated product portfolio to help customers acquire and organize diverse data types, and then analyze them alongside existing enterprise data to discover new insights and make the most informed decisions.

Oracle Big Data Appliance is an engineered system built to gather, organize, and load unstructured data into Oracle Database for advanced analytics. The Oracle Exadata Database Machine provides extreme performance for both data warehousing and online transaction processing (OLTP) applications. Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Machine uses in-memory technology to deliver fast analytics, data visualization, and performance management, complementing the Exadata system. In combination with ZFS Storage Appliances and Pillar Data System, customers can implement a very robust and scalable data management infrastructure for all kinds of data for their enterprise.

“Each of these systems consists of integrated hardware and software, preconfigured, pre-tested and engineered for a certain class of data management requirements” said Kapil Sood, Vice President, Systems, Oracle India. “This unique Big Data approach from Oracle relieves customers off the integration involved in assembling a suitable set of hardware and software components to create big data architecture. In addition, it allows customers to leverage commercial quality support with the entire system being supported by a single vendor.”

“With our Big Data Solutions Platform, we are delivering the latest techniques for managing large volumes of unstructured data with Oracle Big Data Appliance and tightly integrating this data with Oracle Database, Oracle Exadata, and Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Machine—so organizations can do deeper analysis and quickly get real business value from big data,”said Mitesh Agarwal, CTO & Director - Systems Solution Consulting, Oracle India.

The Importance of Big Data

For decades, companies have been making business decisions based on transactional data stored in relational databases. Beyond that critical data, however, is a potential treasure trove of non-traditional, less structured data: weblogs, social media, email, sensors, and photographs that can be mined for useful information. Decreases in the cost of both storage and compute power have made it feasible to collect this data -which would have been thrown away only a few years ago. As a result, more and more companies are looking to include non-traditional yet potentially very valuable data with their traditional enterprise data in their business intelligence analysis.

When big data is distilled and analyzed in combination with traditional enterprise data, enterprises can develop a more thorough and insightful understanding of their business, which can lead to enhanced productivity, a stronger competitive position and greater innovation – all of which can have a significant impact on the bottom line.

“Our customers are very excited about the idea that they can evolve their current enterprises data architecture to incorporate big data and deliver business value, leveraging the proven reliability, flexibility and performance of their Oracle systems to address their big data requirements.” said Kapil “We believe, verticals like BFSI, Retail, Media, and government sectors will adopt Big Data immediately owing to the enormous data flow, while sectors such as healthcare and telecom are likely to be among the early adopters before most verticals adopt Big Data solutions.” he added.

Taming the data deluge

According to industry reports, humans created 150 exabytes of data in 2005, and that number grew eight times to 1,200 exabytes by 2010. Similarly, as per industry estimates enterprise data is growing nearly 60 percent per year (90 percent of that being unstructured) and the average amount of data stored per company is 200 terabytes. By 2020, the size of the “Digital Universe” will increase 44 fold. 

Elaborating on the trends leading to this data deluge, Kapil said, “It feels as if data now rivals oxygen as the most vital human element. Some of the trends fueling this tremendous growth in data are the capture of detailed data more frequently across every customer interaction; the prevalent use of multimedia; the widespread adoption of social media; and the rollout of intelligent sensors embedded in physical devices that can sense, create, and communicate data.”

This flood of information creates a wealth of opportunities for businesses.

For example, in the delivery of healthcare services, management of chronic or long-term conditions is expensive. Use of in-home monitoring devices to measure vital signs, and monitor progress is just one way that sensor data can be used to improve patient health and reduce both office visits and hospital admittance.

Manufacturing companies deploy sensors in their products to return a stream of telemetry. This telemetry also reveals usage patterns, failure rates and other opportunities for product improvement that can reduce development and assembly costs.

The proliferation of smart phones and other GPS devices offers advertisers an opportunity to target consumers when they are in close proximity to a store, a coffee shop or a restaurant. This opens up new revenue for service providers and offers many businesses a chance to target new customers.

Retailers usually know who buys their products. Use of social media and web log files from their ecommerce sites can help them understand who didn’t buy and why they chose not to, information not available to them today. This can enable much more effective micro customer segmentation and targeted marketing campaigns, as well as improve supply chain efficiencies.

Finally, social media sites’ business model requires a personalized experience on the web, which can only be delivered by capturing and using all the available data about a user or member.

Oracle’s Big Data platform is engineered to explore a new chapter of data analytics which has the potential to generate business insights from different data sets changing the way how organizations traditionally use information. With Oracle solutions, Big Data management for organizations will unleash an enormous and immensely valuable set of new business, scientific and social opportunities in the coming years.