Big Data Insights from Microsoft

According to Microsoft’s Global Enterprise Big Data Trends: 2013 study of more than 280 IT decision-makers, the following trends emerged:

• Although the IT department (52 percent) is currently driving most of the demand for big data, customer care (41 percent), sales (26 percent), finance (23 percent) and marketing (23 percent) departments are increasingly driving demand.
• Seventeen percent of customers surveyed are in the early stages of researching big data solutions, whereas 13 percent have fully deployed them; nearly 90 percent of customers surveyed have a dedicated budget for addressing big data.
• Nearly half of customers (49 percent) reported that growth in the volume of data is the greatest challenge driving big data solution adoption, followed by having to integrate disparate business intelligence tools (41 percent) and having tools able to glean the insight (40 percent).

The company published its findings to the Microsoft News Center this morning, kicking off a week of announcements focused on the company’s big-data customers, products and future investments.

Big data absolutely has the potential to change the way governments, organizations, and academic institutions conduct business and make discoveries, and its likely to change how everyone lives their day-to-day lives. Susan Hauser, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s Enterprise and Partner Group