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Big data makes for big talk, but results of a recent survey indicate that seven out of 10 companies have yet to make any investment.
Instead, just 16 percent of companies have invested in big data, according to a survey of more than 300 technology and analytics professionals. The study was commissioned by Snowflake Computing and conducted by Dimensional Research.
Of the companies that have invested, 5 percent have fully deployed big data strategies and 11 percent are in a pilot.
But the great majority of companies haven’t yet made any investment. Instead, 29 percent of respondents said their companies are currently investigating their options and another 41 percent said they are intrigued, but haven’t yet done any work to find out more.
At the same time, 99 percent of respondents indicated their data warehouses are important or very important to business operations.
The survey also indicated that even with the significant amount of discussion of alternative big data platforms, data warehousing investment continues to grow.
Seventy percent of companies are increasing their data warehousing investment, while only 4 percent are reducing their investment in data warehousing.
Respondents’ top data warehousing challenges include scalability (43 percent); cost to maintain (38 percent); cost to purchase (37 percent), and the difficult learning curve for business users (37 percent).
Nine out of 10 respondents see benefits in cloud data warehousing with the right capabilities.
A cloud-based data warehouse with the ability to scale on demand (66 percent) and deliver lower administrative overhead (59 percent) would deliver the most benefit, according to survey respondents.
Around one-third of companies (32 percent) already are using cloud-based data warehousing, including 14 percent that have exclusively adopted cloud and do not support an on-premises data warehouse.
Almost two-thirds of participants in the survey (62 percent) have data in the cloud, either in SaaS applications like Salesforce.com, or in public infrastructure clouds like Amazon AWS.
Most companies (79 percent) with data in the cloud are bringing at least some of their cloud data into a data warehouse.
Only 9 percent of companies are bringing all cloud data into the data warehouse, and 55 percent have less than half of their cloud data in their data warehouse.
Users need to closely evaluate the different data warehouse technologies, noted Jon Bock, vice president of product and marketing at Snowflake.
“There are many examples of failed projects that underestimated the challenge of rolling out a new technology that the organization didn’t have the expertise to make successful,” Bock told eWEEK.
“Rapid iteration and experimentation will become the norm. Business judgment will continue to be important, but the ability to rapidly evaluate and iterate based on data insight will become the focus,” Bock said. “Decision makers who can think and plan based on hypotheses and testing will become the norm.”