The ING Global Opportunities strategy uses a thematic approach to identify attractive investment opportunities. The sub-theme ‘Big Data’ helps identify companies that will benefit from a growing global requirement to collect, organise, mine and analyse large and diverse datasets.
Data growth is exploding. Before 2003 mankind created 5 exabytes of data, now we generate 5 exabytes of data every 3 days. Decoding the human genome took 10 years before 2003 but now it can be achieved in one week. Wal-Mart handles more than 1 million customer transactions every hour with the equivalent amount of data as 167 times the books in America’s Library of Congress. Large amounts of data offer opportunities but putting it all together requires new IT solutions. Enter Big Data!
What is Big Data?
The benefits to a business of using its own data are frequently higher when addressing the variety of the data it collects as opposed to the volume. Unfortunately traditional data warehouses are not well-equipped to do this and certainly cannot handle modern unstructured data such as videos, images, texts and music. Fortunately, there is a new and on-going form of innovation within the IT sector that is permitting many organizations to deploy large amounts of complex data at a much faster rate and sophistication than previously was possible. This is what we call Big Data.
In practice Big Data has two main definitions. It usually refers to a special type of data: high volume, high speed and complex; or to a set of new technologies used to collect, organise, mine and analyse large and diverse datasets.
What is driving Big Data?
The real commercial treasure is considered to be the ability to analyse the large volumes of social content and related behaviour. Of course, in order to do this you would need to have the right kind of software and also a certain level of speed to ensure timely application of any business opportunities.
The benefits of combining large volumes of complex data with analytics and velocity are still yet to be discovered in some industries while in others they are already being implemented. In retail, for example, predictive big data analytics based on shopping habits have been around for a while.
Sub-theme within the Global Opportunities strategy
Leveraging Big Data will be a necessity for running the companies of the future. Adopting Big Data solutions could be like opening a treasure chest for many businesses. The ING Global Opportunities team seeks to identify the winners from this trend. Big Data is a sub-theme within the strategy’s ‘Digital Revolution’ investment theme, which is one of the seven main pillars of the team’s thematic approach to global investing.
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