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Big Data is a term that many companies have been throwing around recently – but all it really means is large amounts of data. It is all of the data that your company has to keep, but doesn’t really know what to do with. And when your company has large amounts of data it is important that you know what to do with that data and where to store it.

For most companies big data becomes a concern when thinking about data warehouses and the intelligence functions that are essential to operations, forecasting, and understanding the marketplace.

To decide if your company could benefit from Big Data you might want to consider these 5 “V”s:

1. Volume: How much data does your company have?

2. Velocity: How quickly does your company need to gather data from sources?

3. Variety: Does your company have structured, semi-structured, or unstructured data? Or do they have a variety of all three?

4. Value: What if you could combine larger sets of data, and didn’t have to decide what data to keep and what to get rid of?

5. Variability: How does your company want to interpret data in the short and the long term?

Do you agree that big data is the next big thing? If so will these 5 “V”s help you prepare for big data making them ripe? Or are the 5 “V”s hype?

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