Industry news

There has been a lot of hype surrounding Big Data and how the information explosion, and resulting complexity, is now a top priority for businesses – some vendors have even suggested that organisations face yet another a ‘rip and replace’ watershed. However, analysts have commented that any new technology should be complementary to existing tools, not an alternative. While there has been much discussion about what companies can hope to achieve with Big Data once they’ve overhauled their entire existing infrastructure, businesses should instead be focusing on how they can use this information today.

According to IDC, Big Data is ramping up to be a big business opportunity, with companies on average doubling the amount of data they create every two years. The firm also estimates that companies will spend $120bn globally on data analytics software between now and 2015. Due to this exponential growth in information, managing and organising data is becoming increasingly complex for businesses. Traditional relational databases are becoming less useful and relevant as more ad hoc information is being created outside of those systems. But, while Business Intelligence (BI) tools have been around for a while to extract value from relational databases, few companies currently have the technology in place to apply the same degree of sophistication to unstructured data, such as call transcripts, documents, emails, instant messages and social media. What is different about Big Data is that it includes sources that were previously ignored; unstructured data being the main one, which itself contains a myriad of untapped and valuable information. Data left unmanaged and un-analysed is worthless. In fact, it can be problematic as it represents a cost to the business in terms of storage and may leave a company vulnerable to compliance concerns. The ability to extract meaning from data is where its true value lies.

Informed business decisions must be based on the totality of information and not merely a subset of transactional data from a relational database. Unstructured data by its very nature is uncategorised and lacks the metadata that allows for easy identification and organisation. This can potentially leave data in a state of chaos, exposing the business to legal and compliance risks – especially those in regulated industries. This can end up costing businesses vast sums of money to analyse information on a purely reactive basis. As such, organising, managing, and analysing this chaotic data proactively is a more cost effective approach, and can provide businesses with valuable insight through the evaluation of unstructured data. If businesses rely on structured information alone, they are potentially missing out on key information spread across its disparate systems within the organisation as well as conversations taking place between its customers, and the business beyond its four walls.

The real ‘big’ in Big Data is the amount of unstructured data that businesses now have to manage and track. Businesses should be able to build up a customer profile to analyse and calculate risk through the collection of data from various mediums. They need solutions - whether they are internal or outsourced - that can help employees effectively access key information through predictive information management and analysis. The only way to do that at the scale of big data is to use machine learning to automatically categorise and analyse that information. . Without these solutions, businesses may be exposed to legal and compliance issues run the risk of not being able to respond to their customers, respond to their regulators or react quickly to threats of litigation.. This again highlights the importance of getting to grips with unstructured data as well as structured data, but how can businesses organise this chaotic landscape?

Integral to this is the ability to identify, understand and categorise the key information amongst the vast amounts of unorganised and unstructured data. Traditionally, it is held on file servers, in document management systems, archives records management systems. But extracting value from the information held there is usually very hard because it wasn’t stored in any uniform way and wasn’t categorized accurately.

But now software exists that can accurately index and categorise such data that resides in these repositories and can extract intelligence that aligns with business goals, this providing a competitive edge and reducing legal and compliance risks. Businesses must know what information resides within their systems; be it structured, semi-structured or unstructured data. By using software to identify words, phrases and concepts in context businesses can embrace and take advantage of the data explosion, rather than living in fear of it overwhelming them.

Everything Everywhere, owners of Orange and T-mobile, have completed a deal which will see mobile operator 3 acquire part of its 1800MHz spectrum.

The acquisition will allow 3 to launch its own 4G services, alongside Everything Everywhere. The move comes as part of the European Commission’s stipulations for ensuring effective market competition.

Dave Dyson, CEO of 3 UK, said: ““Acquiring this spectrum will more than double the capacity available to customers on our network”.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) are looking to introduce a new online storage system named ‘Glacier’.

The new storage service would offer cheap storage, from $0.01 per gigabyte a month. The service has been designed for archival data, aimed at data that would not have to be accessed rapidly, with expectations of retrieval being in the hours rather than minutes.

The service is designed to replace tape archives as a backup technology, with Amazon describing “older tape libraries are less efficient and therefore costlier to operate”.

Bristol City Council are to move to an open source record and management system in a bid to reduce operational spending by £70 million.

The new electronic management tools are to be supplied by Alfresco, with services accessible through mobile devices.

Gavin Beckett, chief enterprise architect, described the councils move to further open source projects through the G-Cloud, saying: “We are actively investigating G-Cloud, and revising our multi-sourcing strategy”.

Glencore's chief executive, Ivan Glasenberg, has revealed that Glencore would be willing to walk away from acquiring mining company Xstrata.

Glasenberg said that the deal was not a "must-do deal", after demands to raise the £30 billion offer for the company.

"If it takes another year, another two years or even another five years we can revisit the deal whenever. In the meantime, no one else can do anything while we hold our 35 per cent stake in Xstrata," said Glasenberg.

Research from the quarterly Mobile Workforce Report by iPass has shown that employees are working up to 20 unpaid hours more because of BYOD.

A survey showed that a third of employees did not disconnect from technology during non-work hours while only eight percent disconnected during holidays.

Rene Hendrikse, VP of EMEA at iPass, said: “BYOD is effectively turning us into a generation of productive workaholics, with many workers seemingly happy to work during their downtime in exchange for flexibility in how and where they work”.

Culture secretary Jeremy Hunt has declared that the UK will have the fastest broadband speed in Europe by 2015.

Hunt detailed that the government is planning to invest £300 million generated from the television licence fee into high-speed broadband services, with the view of increasing speeds above 24Mbit/s for over 90 percent of the UK.

Hunt said that UK broadband was already competing competitively with European countries: "Two thirds of the population are now on packages of more than 10 Mbit/s, higher than anywhere in Europe except Portugal and perhaps surprisingly Bulgaria".

The owners of Orange and T-Mobile, Everything Everywhere, have been approved by Ofcom to launch new 4G services from the 11th of September.

The new 4G services would be launched through the existing bandwidths of the two companies, with the service allowing for increased broadband speeds.

Vodafone and O2 both registered disappointment with the decision, however Ofcom said that the "significant benefits" of the service were greater than competition concerns.

The merger of Youku and Tudou as the largest online video company in China moves closer to finalisation, as shareholders of both companies agree on the plan.

The merger would reduce costs and boost the market share of both companies, desirable with the backdrop of rising streaming and bandwidth costs.

The merger, originally announced in March, will see Youku acquire Tudou through a $1 billion stock exchange.

The UK government is planning to launch a global NHS expansion this autumn, with the goal to link NHS hospitals with foreign governments.

The move is designed to exploit demand from foreign intuitions for NHS services and capitalise on the Olympic focus on the service as seen with Danny Boyle’s homage to the NHS.

Areas focused on would include those already exposed to UK medical services including the Gulf, India, Brazil and China.

Profits made my NHS hospitals abroad would be reinvested back within the UK. The plan would see NHS trusts partner with private companies in order to receive funding for overseas expansion and reduce financial risk.