Advertising, telecommunications, financial services, & health care could be big data's first beneficiaries

SAN FRANCISCO — The Hadoop open-source big data software is great at predicting things, and the more data it has to work with, the better the predictions, Charles Zedlewski, Cloudera’s vice president of products, said today at VentureBeat’s DataBeat conference.

It follows that the industries that rely the most on the ability to predict will be the first to go deep with Hadoop. Zedlewski and Intel’s general manager of big data solutions, Ron Kasabian, who were interviewed together here today, suggest that those industries will be advertising, telecommunications, banking, and health care.

It’s safe to say that all industries need the power to predict, but in these industries, that ability is directly tied to revenues.

Zedlewski called out the advertising industry because it depends on the ability to predict what product preferences customers might display in the future. With an understanding of this, advertisers can put ads in front of people who are likely to click them. That understanding might come from a user profile created with data sitting in Hadoop.

Similarly, health insurance companies need to be able to predict the type and amount of health services that patients will access, and when. With a good understanding of this, insurers can compensate health care service providers at the right rate. They could also use Hadoop to help predict material resources. On the other side, health care provider organizations might be able to use the predictive data in negotiations with health insurance companies.

Intel announced a large partnership with Cloudera earlier this year, in which the two companies will collaborate on building a common Hadoop distribution — one that will run very well on Intel-based servers. The project will be done by the end of this year. Oh, and Intel made a $740 million investment in Cloudera.

Intel’s Ron Kasabian says Intel’s customers in China have been first to go deep with its original Hadoop distribution. And those customers, so far, have been from the telecommunications and financial services industries.

“We’ve seen a lot of uptake among China telcos to provide better experiences on mobile devices,” Kasabian said. “We’ve seen uptake in the financial services industry, where they would like to be able to better understand consumer credit risk.”

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