Overview
The big box stores like Wal-Mart and online retailers like Amazon have been leveraging "Big Data" for years, but they have millions of customers and hundreds of thousands of transactions a week. How can small organizations hope to tap into Big Data when they don't hit a hundred thousand transactions in a year? The answer is while smaller organizations likely won't achieve the Big Data capabilities of their larger counter parts, it doesn't mean they still shouldn't travel the path.Big Data, much like "The Cloud", is an industry buzz term comparable to large scale Business Intelligence. Gartner defines Big Data as "high-volume, high-velocity and high-variety information assets that demand cost-effective, innovative forms of information processing for enhanced insight and decision making.".
Plotting points on a graph helps to conceptualize the high-volume of Big Data. If you have two points on a graph, A and B, a straight line is drawn and an assumption is made the line will continue its trend after point B.
