For a long time, United States Postal Service clerks sorted mail by hand. However, in the 1950s, USPS responded to massive mail volumes by installing the Transorma Letter Sorting Machine, which sorted 15,000 letters an hour – double the previous rate. VMC expert Chuck Hobart says the Cloud can also be used as a sorting machine for large amounts of data.
Today, many companies have millions of unstructured data points coming in each day, filling up lots of space – this is called “Big Data.” Big Data is hard to manage because on-premise technology isn’t able to keep up with the influx of information. Companies end up just storing this information, which is costly.
Now, since the Cloud is so scalable and elastic, many are leveraging it as an analytics tool for Big Data, to filter out useless information and retain important information. This going to be an important Cloud application; according to the International Data Corporation (IDC), Big Data technology is expected to experience a compound annual growth rate of 40 percent through 2015.
People tend to assume that processing Big Data is mostly relevant to technology companies, but it affects many areas. For example, a home improvement retailer wanted to know if they could offer a discount on full kitchen remodels and still make a tidy profit. They ran Big Data technology through their huge database of purchasing information collected over two years. They were shocked at their customers’ actual spending habits. First, they learned that floor tiles weren’t as popular with renovators as they’d thought. Due to the Cloud’s ability to process Big Data, this retailer finally figured out that they could offer a 20 percent discount on a full kitchen remodel and recover significantly more than that. Cloud computing enabled the company to make a good business decision that resulted in a win-win situation.
These days, the large amount of data a company amasses often goes untouched, but with the help of the Cloud, that information can be sorted and sifted. How could the Cloud help you mine a goldmine in sales potential and business insights from your data?
Contact Chuck Hobart at ChuckH@vmc.com or 877.393.8622.
