I am often asked whether it is the vendors or the end users who are driving the Big Data market. I usually reply that both are. There are early adopters of any technology that push the vendors to evolve their own products and services. The vendors then show other companies what can be done with this new and improved technology.

Big Data and Big Data Analytics are hot topics right now. Different vendors, of course, come at it from their own point of view. We take a look at how four vendors (Attensity, IBM, SAS, and SAP) are positioning around this space, some of their product offerings, and use cases for Big Data Analytics.

In Attensity’s world Big Data is all about high volume customer conversations. Attensity text analytics solutions can be used to analyze both internal and external data sources to better understand the customer experience. For example, it can analyze sources such as call center notes, emails, survey verbatim and other documents to understand customer behavior. With its recent acquisition of Biz360, the company can combine social media from 75 million sources and analyze this content to understand the customer experience. Since industry estimates put the structured/unstructured data ratio at 20%/80%, this kind of data needs to be addressed. While vendors with Big Data appliances have talked about integrating and analyzing unstructured data as part of the Big Data equation, most of what has been done to date has dealt primarily with structured data. This is changing, but it is good to see a text analytics vendor address this issue head on.

Attensity already has a partnership with Teradata so it can marry information extracted from its unstructured data (from internal conversations) together with structured data stored in the Teradata Warehouse. Recently, Attensity extended this partnership to Aster Data, which was acquired by Teradata. Aster Data provides a platform for Big Data Analytics. The Aster MapReduce Platform is a massively parallel software solution that embeds MapReduce analytic processing with data stores for big data analytics on what the company terms “multistructured data sources and types.” Attensity can now be embedded as a runtime SQL in the Aster Data library to enable the real time analysis of social media streams. Aster Data will also act as long term archival and analytics platform for the Attensity real-time Command Center platform for social media feeds and iterative exploratory analytics. By mid 2012 the plan is for complete integration to the Attensity Analyze application.

Attensity describes several use cases for the real time analysis of social streams:

1. Voice of the Customer Command Center: the ability to semantically annotate real-time social data streams and combine that with multi-channel customer conversation data in a Command Center view that gives companies a real-time view of what customers are saying about their company, products and brands.
2. Hotspotting: the ability to analyze customer conversations to identify emerging trends. Unlike common keyword based approaches, Hotspot reports identify issues that a company might not already know about, as they emerge, by measuring the “significance” of change in probability for a data value between a historical period and the current period. Attensity then assigns a “temperature” value to mark the degree of difference between the two probabilities. Hot means significantly trending upward in the current period vs. historical. Cold means significantly trending downward in the current period vs. historical.
3. Customer service: the ability to analyze conversations to identify top complaints and issues and prioritize incoming calls, emails or social requests accordingly.

Next Up: IBM