Published on the 27/11/2013 | Written by Newsdesk
Hadoop has become a byword for big data projects – and Oracle is keen to exploit that with an online self-assessment tool which it says will help companies determine how “Hadoop-ready” they are…
For the last year Oracle has been working with Australian companies on proofs of concept (PoC) regarding big data. According to Vicky Falconer, Oracle’s big data solution specialist, those PoCs can last anywhere from four weeks to seven months – the latter largely as a result of scope creep.
The company is now offering a new programme to enterprises in Australia and New Zealand which will see Oracle work with companies on a self-contained big data project lasting just three to six weeks. Falconer acknowledged that the initiative is unashamedly a pre-sales tool for Oracle – but is also intended to demonstrate what can be achieved with big data analysis.
To be admitted to the programme companies will need to be able clearly to define a business problem and demonstrate executive support for the initiative, she said. Without “real clarity about the business problem and evidence it is a clear executive priority,” companies won’t be admitted to the programme Falconer warned.
Oracle has also developed an online self-assessment tool that it says can help companies identify how “Hadoop ready” they are. This, however, seems little more than a gimmick – while Hadoop is widely used in big data projects to sift through unstructured data, being able to use the tool is no guarantee of a project’s success – and Falconer herself acknowledges that.
Successful big data projects are those which turn insights from big data into actions – and that requires much more than an understanding of a particular technology. “Hadoop is not the be all and end all,” Falconer acknowledged. “You can’t have successful big data without the right people to understand the business issues.”
At present she said that most of the big data activity in Australia was at the experimentation phase. That’s backed up globally by analyst Gartner which has reported that although 64 percent of organisations say they have plans to invest in big data in 2013, only 8 percent of companies have yet deployed working solutions.
