Businesses and IT suppliers to collaborate on big data

Businesses are to collaborate to work out how to exploit the rapidly growing volume of data generated by social media, mobile devices and the internet of things.

Businesses and IT suppliers, working in a forum established by The Open Group, an independent technology consortium, aim to identify the best practices that will help business integrate data into real-time decision making.

“We have all this data out there. We have to think how you bring this data in, manage it, and turn it into something that business can make decisions on in real time,” said Dave Lounsbury,  CTO of The Open Group.

The forum aims to help organisations manage and share high volume, high velocity data, and to find practical ways of visualising it an analysing it.

“External forces like social networks, and networks of sensors have created an influx of data. We need to break it down and analyse it from a business perspective, and find out what questions business people need to be asking,” he said.

The group aims to define technology platforms, reference architectures and standards that will help business make sense of growing volumes of data.

It will also aim to develop ways to help enterprises process data in the cloud, and integrate mobile devices into the enterprise, as cloud, data, mobile and other technologies increasingly converge.

The Open Group is strongly positioned to lead the work, as it has a lot of the pieces already in place, says Lounsbury.

“We have the cloud working group, a quantum life cycle group, looking at the internet of things, major vendor companies that produce the infrastructure to make this happen, and our larger member companies are looking at data from sensors, “ he said.

The Open Group, was founded to encourage organisations to break down internal information barriers and silos in  organisations, following the publication of the influential book, The Boundaryless Organisation

“Step forward 15 or 20 years and for the enterprise to remain competitive, they have to break down the barriers not only in their own organisations but with the outside world,” said Lounsbury.

The group is looking for organisations that make use of data, and suppliers developing potential solutions, to take part in the project.