The Dawn of Data Companies

I remember that when I took my first programming class in high school, I felt as if an entire world of possibilities was at my fingertips; if there was ever a need or a problem to be solved, I was now more prepared to develop software to address it.  But that was quite a while ago, and the climate has taken a dramatic shift away from the familiar world of software and into the brave new world of data which, unfortunately, puts my own personal graveyard of software ideas even further into the ground!

Nevertheless, this progression away from software towards data-based companies does make economic and business sense.  Forbes’ article, “RIP ‘Software’ Companies; Hello ‘Data’ Companies” cites the shift in cloud computing and the aggregation of data that has become more valuable as it increases in size.  Mike Hoskins is mentioned in the article as saying, “[is] Google a software company?  Is Facebook a software company?  They’re not, they’re data companies.  The value they and many other companies provide to the market is their ability to manage data and provide analysis.”

It is with that statement that we can see that our lives revolve around the distribution and processing of data.  Facebook profits from the data that users input into their systems, Google collects data from its searches, and Forbes processes such business-related data and has writers talk about it.  Once big data sets became a big deal, the point was reached where collections of data themselves can provide profitable information to many types of companies.

Today we see a demand for the manipulation of data, where companies are being paid to sell, analyze, process, and reevaluate data.  Multiple datasets are  brought together for companies to be able to piece together the bigger picture, and patterns are being discerned that were previously unknown. Because of all of these new situations and opportunities, it is all the more necessary for companies to be able to process their new and massive data sets in efficient ways. Through the effective utilization of big data analysis, businesses are able to make better and faster decisions because these massive data is being collected and analyzed in ways never before possible.