Silicon Valley Bank and hack/reduce invited leading companies and startups to discuss the future of Big Data on May 21, 2015 in Boston. The event drew nearly 150 people who heard from speakers representing AT&T, Thomson Reuters, Booz Allen Hamilton, LG Innovation Ventures, In-Q-Tel, and IDC, among others. They described the evolution of Big Data infrastructure and analysis over the past two decades and discussed the focus of the next wave of development.
To kick off the event, Steve Allan, the head of SVB Analytics, presented compelling new research to make the case that "the hype is real," and he shared insight on how to be best-prepared for a decade of Big Data disruption. He outlined the monumental growth in the volume and types of information being collected and analyzed, and where the greatest opportunities are for driving efficiency and value.
Here are the highlights from Steve's presentation:
- While much hyped over the past decade, we are on the verge of a Big Data disruption on a mass scale across all industries.
- The collection of Big Data is buoyed by the rapid growth of the Internet of Things and mobile devices.
- Data storage, computing and bandwidth costs have dropped dramatically, removing impediments and laying the foundation for Big Data infrastructure.
- Venture investors now see the time is ripe to create value by investing in the application layer, which effectively leverages the last decade of infrastructure development for deep, near real-time data analysis.
- Venture investments initially focused on lower-friction industries, such as advertising. But, as applications advance, capital is now chasing returns promised by higher-friction, high-value industries, including healthcare, financial services, energy, agriculture and security/intelligence.
- As the infrastructure impediments disappear and new analytical tools proliferate, the source data will have the highest value. Tomorrow, proprietary data will create the biggest competitive advantage.