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1What Is Big Data?The term Big Data is a bit of a misnomer. Truth be told, we’re not even bigfans of the term—despite the fact that it’s so prominently displayed on thecover of this book—because it implies that other data is somehow small(it might be) or that this particular type of data is large in size (it can be, butdoesn’t have to be). For this reason, we think it’s best to devote an entirechapter to the task of explaining exactly what Big Data is.Why Is Big Data Important?Before you try to understand what Big Data is, you should know why BigData matters to business. In a nutshell, the quest for Big Data is directlyattributable to analytics, which has evolved from being a business initiative toa business imperative.In fact, we’d say that analytics has caused a bifurcation of industry participants:some are leaders and some are followers. It’s hard to overlook the impactthat analytics has had on organizations during the last decade or so. IBM’sInstitute of Business Value, in partnership with MIT’s Sloan Management Review,published the results of a study in a paper called The New Intelligent Enterprise.This paper concluded that organizations that achieve a competitive advantagewith analytics are over two times more likely to substantially outperformtheir industry peers. Think about that for a moment: Analytics (specifically,analytics enriched with Big Data) will help you to outperform your competitors,so if your business is simply curious about Big Data, and your competitors aremore than curious—well, you get the point.3