ADVANCED analytical capabilities? Enhanced business intelligence? Superior decision support abilities? The ability to turn data into money?

Nope. While all those are good things and very worthwhile pursuits, they are not the reasons our industry is so enamored with the construct of big data.  The reason we love big data is far less complex.

There are really two reasons:  first, because Oracle decided to get into the game and second, because once we figured out why they wanted to get into the game, we realized there was a ton of money to be made–or lost.

The IT industry has been built on the back of transactional systems. Those are the most expensive, most important systems in our worlds and as such have the best people on them.

Transactions occur once.  We make sure our systems scale to meet transactional demands–once.  We pay a lot to over-provision in every aspect because transactional scale is not a nice to have, it’s mandatory.

Big data is created by copying transactional data and sticking it on another system. Over time, those systems become supersets of our transactional systems. We make lots of copies and put them in lots of big data systems.

Since we used big iron/big databases/big money stuff on our transactional systems, we had the tendency to duplicate those investments on our big data systems even though those systems behave completely differently from each other.  So we found ourselves with giant systems and giant expenses all over the enterprise, built for transaction processing, that don’t ever do transaction processing. They sit idle 90% of the time, waiting for an “analyst” to come up with some query to run against the data set.

Oracle sells TONS of RDB licenses for big data infrastructure, even though it seems stupid that that type of data sits inside an RDB. People are creatures of habit. Industry counts on it. So, along comes the benevolent Mr. Ellison. He sees that the masses are paying $3M+ in infrastructure costs for each of their big data piles. He doesn’t think he is getting enough of that pie.

So he brilliantly decides that he can radically reduce the spend on hardware by packaging up commodity stuff purpose-built to handle the big data issues. He then bundles all of his magic software–which now consumes 80 percent of the spend–and puts a bow on it for customers. Then he gets downright evil (and even more brilliant): he runs into all the big sites, performs a quick software audit, and finds out those sites are all out of licensing compliance. Suddenly, customer A gets handed a bill for $4M–but not to fret, because the good people at Oracle have a simple solution: instead of just paying up, why not just buy a new Exadata system–which will greatly simplify your life–and we’ll make that little compliance issue disappear?  Genius, really. I figure there is at least $6B in big iron at risk in this area alone.

Now, not to be overtly pessimistic, there is a silver lining. Once all the plays have been made for their ulterior motives, then everyone will get down to the real value at hand, which is making those random piles of data start generating customer value. That will happen.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Steve Duplessie is the founder of and Senior Analyst at the Enterprise Strategy Group. Recognised worldwide as the leading independent authority on enterprise storage, Steve has also consistently been ranked as one of the most infuential IT analysts. You can track Steve’s blog at http://www.thebiggertruth.com