Is Big Data an e-Business?

IBM's initiative around e-Business was arguably one of the better marketing campaigns in IT history.It emerged in the late 90's and really set the agenda for companies overnight: either you were an e-business or you were not.



This campaign set off an arms race, to determine which companies would lead in the internet era, in every major industry.

Obviously, you don't hear anyone talking about e-businesses anymore. It's the de-facto, the standard, life-as-usual, etc. In fact, it has become the default: everyone is an e-business. It's so obvious that we need not discuss it.

With all the hype around Big Data, I often hear people question if this is simply a fad or a passing trend. I put Big Data on the opposite end of the spectrum from hype. I believe that Big Data will become so fundamental to how organizations are run, that eventually the term will fade in relevance. Big Data will become fundamental to the fabric of an organization. This will happen once the public begins to embrace it as the next generation of middleware. And once that happens, we'll only hear the term Big Data, in the same breath as e-Business.

---------------------------------------

Moving from hype/excitement to mainstream, starts with education. Here is some Big Data open source 101 content:

Hadoop
MapReduce
HDFS
Pig
Hive
Zookeeper
Hbase