HP expands Big Data offering

Hewlett Packard recently expanded its Big Data Consulting Practice offering strategy, design and implementation services to help customers mine the wealth of available information for business opportunities.

“Business intelligence has always been there, but there is not much focus on unstructured data. What is sitting in your e-mails, what is sitting in the photos, in your documents and web pages. There is a wealth of information that companies can look into how they can extract it, analyze it and make some business decisions,” said Mohan Krishnan, vice president and general manager, technology consulting and technology services of HP Asia Pacific and Japan.

The announcement was made during the first HP World Tour held in Beijing in June, which was attended by IT specialists and journalists from Asia Pacific and Japan.

Big data refers to a massive volume of both structured and unstructured information. Krishnan says that when a client calls the bank for a transaction, the information is structured but when the client tweets a complaint about the service, that is unstructured.

“The whole thing about big data is what I call predictive analysis. That means you predict what will happen in the future. Do you want to make a guess or do you want to analyze the data that you have? So many people have access to Facebook and there is a business opportunity in what they are saying,” Krishnan said.

“If a bank knows what their customers are buying, they would be able to create new services and new offerings. Same goes with telcos and manufacturing. By analyzing information, it could help them bring new streams of revenue and new opportunities for business,” he said.

In the Philippines, the opportunity for big data lies in the business process outsourcing and banking industries, Krishnan said.

HP helps customers develop an integrated IT strategy for the capture, consolidation and management of big data through Transformation Experience Workshops where HP experts meet with stakeholders.

HP offers customization and configuration of Hadoop, a scalable, flexible and cost-effective framework that supports processing of large data, through Enterprise Design Service, Implementation Service, and Reference Architecture Implementation Service.

HP Big Data Protection and Compliance Analysis, on the other hand, helps customers identify potential issues, risks and challenges, and achieve compliance with government and industry data security requirements.