It is essential to understand that big data is a concept, not a technology. It encompasses many disciplines and depends of collaboration of complementary expertise of IT professionals, computer scientists, mathematicians, statisticians, software engineers, database administrators, systems engineers and cybersecurity experts, just to name a few. Companies like At Scale represent a category of solution providers that transform big data into reports and insights, collectively referred to as business intelligence.
Given the multidisciplinary nature of big data, the concept evolves continuously. Faster computers and memory mean more data can be collected and stored. Faster processors lead to more data being processed faster. More efficient algorithms mean new ways to analyze and mine data – and produce meaningful reports.
From a computer science perspective, the most interesting aspects of big data are the development of algorithms and development of software applications in languages like R, Scala or Python.
From an IT perspective, big data is a fascinating nexus in which complex system architecture meets distributed databases, requiring constant tuning for performance.
Big data theoreticians focus on certain areas of statistics and mathematics to build conceptual models for how big data can be collected, analyzed and visualized. It is rare for big data professionals to be experts in more than one area such as IT, computer science, statistics and database design. They typically focus on one area only.