Will Savvis Win the Race Against Big Data?

Everyone seems to be buzzing around big data these days, which only seems to be growing in proportions. Handling it is becoming complex, but as it is driving disruptive change, businesses are being forced to find solutions that will help unlock the value of big data.

Savvis, a CenturyLink company and provider of infrastructure and hosted IT solutions, is lending a helping hand. It has designed a full suite of services to help organizations extract the maximum value from their data.

Big data strains the ability of technology to store, process and access customer data, and traditional data management approaches are inadequate; they can neither handle the huge data volumes nor analyze customer events stored in different data formats.

Mike Gualtieri and Noel Yuhanna, principal analysts at Forrester (News - Alert) Research, believe that the variety, volume and velocity of data are a boon for customer data richness, but only if organizations have the correct technology and processes in place.

"Customer engagement can’t begin without a next-gen customer data management platform," noted Gualtieri and Yuhanna in a July 2013 report. Steve Garrou, vice president, global solutions management, at Savvis concurs with the analysts’ viewpoint.

"Businesses wanting to transform their operations and customer experiences through powerful, new analytics capabilities need a robust IT foundation," observed Garrou.

This is where Savvis big data solutions could play an important role in helping organizations maximize value from their analytics investments. They offer a comprehensive approach to big data -- enterprise-grade Infrastructure-as-a-Service capabilities, high bandwidth connectivity, scalable compute and storage platforms, big data planning and implementation services and even consulting services for clients – that can respond to today's rapidly evolving analytics technologies.

The firms' managed services for Cloudera and MapR platforms based on Apache Hadoop deliver faster time to market through secure and scalable infrastructure services.

But although such solutions are a boon, they are just the beginning of what promises to be a long and difficult road. Big data requires mega solutions, capable of handling the deluge of data that is inundating us from all sides.

It’s a mega-race, with everyone doubling down with new products and enhancements and promises galore. But the million dollar question is, can we really keep up?