CIOs Confirm Big Data is a Strategic Investment in their Organization

Given all the hype surrounding big data technology, we decided to find out how well do large enterprise CIOs know the technology and their plans for adopting the same. The results are fairly interesting. The survey was done online wherein we invited large enterprise CIOs having more than 500 employees in their respective organizations to tell us about their familiarity with big data technology and plans to leverage it. We received 50 responses, and presented here are the results.

Big Data has High Potential, but Requires Greater Awareness

Big Data technology is no longer a mystery. Thirty eight percent of the large enterprises CIOs in India are mostly familiar with it, while another 18 percent are completely familiar. Out of these responses also, a majority of the CIOs were from very large organizations with 1,000+ employees. The ones that were not familiar with the technology were from the relatively smaller organizations with 500+ employees.

Yes, Big Data is Considered a Strategic Investment

Absolutely! When we asked CIOs whether Big Data was being considered as a strategic investment in their organizations, 48 percent responded with a "yes". Only 28 percent said no, and another 24 percent didn't answer. We got our reasons when they answered our next question on their plans for deploying Big Data technology.

Big Data has High Potential, but Requires Greater Awareness

Fifty percent of the CIOs we surveyed were either already using or planning to leverage Big Data in the near future. There's plenty of scope for Big Data penetration in large enterprises, because only four percent of the CIOs said point blank that they had no plans of using it in the near future. The remaining, which is a whopping 36 percent either knew the technology but didn't know how to leverage it or they didn't know enough about the technology to really give an answer.

Oracle is the Most Familiar Big Data Brand

In this question, respondents were allowed to tick all the vendor names they were aware of, and even mention other names if they knew more. Oracle got the highest votes, followed by EMC and IBM tied for the second spot. SAP followed closely followed by HP. Interestingly, Apache Hadoop, despite all the excitement and noise around it, was not as familiar, receiving only 8% of the responses.

Big Data is Considered Expensive

Twenty six percent of the CIOs said deploying Big Data involves high costs, and another 20 percent find it difficult to justify the investment to their management. Costs aside, there's a strong need to generate more awareness about the true value of Big Data and how it can benefit an organization. All other factors come later.

CIO Views on Big Data

"We are using Big Data analytics extensively in our sales and marketing functon to further improve our customer service levels and customer delight."

-Vijay Sethi, VP and CIO, Hero MotoCorp

"We are struggling to keep up with the rising tide of data so hiring a full-time resource dedicated to managing data backup may not be feasible for our enterprises. Plus we have to provide documentation for something related to regulatory compliance."

-Vivek Dharia, CIO, KNP Securities

"Being an ITES organization, we have two-fold focus on Big Data:

1. Applying it for customers: Thus readying teams, expertise, accelerators and partnership leverage infras for the same.

2. For self-use: applying Big Data solutions for HRM initiatives"

-Vikas K Verma, VP emerging technologies, Cybage Software

"We have setup a local infrastructure along with an account on Amazon Cloud Services. Plus, we've given internal training on Big Data/Hadoop Frameworks. After this, we plan to create use cases around customer sentiments, build a framework around Big Data and use cloud services for internal PoC."

-Neeraj Pandey, technical architect, Infinite Computer Solutions

"We are using SAP big data for our Delhi and Mumbai Electricity consumers."

-Kailash Singh, BSES

"In India Big Data draws a lot of attention and the BFSI segment has a lot more to do with data and therefore a lot more to do with Big Data as well. We have our own narrative for a decade, and have a "Data Matters" division that leads our company's business decision making process based on transactional data stored in our relational databases. Beyond this compliance data, there's a lot of other critical customer information such as photographs, bio-metrics, voice transmission, support document scanning, signature verification, CCTV and video footage, emails, sensors, etc that's mostly unstructured and a potential trove to use Big Data. All this data can be mined further for useful information using document management systems through Big Data.

We analyze the huge volume of information through this existing data to find new insights and then capitalize on hidden relationships. We use the most affordable methods to acquire, organize and analyze our big data. For example, we operate an internal website that can force to use big data to understand internal users' activities, like paths through the site, pages viewed, and comments posted. This knowledge can be combined with financial history and stored in a central data storage using corporate relational database. From this, the company gains a better understanding of internal customers, and can fine-tune offers to target the individual's interests"

-Suresh A Shan, CIO, M&M Financial Services