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What Is Big Data? 11Think about it for a moment. The opportunity cost clock on your datastarts ticking the moment the data hits the wire. As organizations, we’re takingfar too long to spot trends or pick up valuable insights. It doesn’t matterwhat industry you’re in; being able to more swiftly understand and respondto data signals puts you in a position of power. Whether you’re trying tounderstand the health of a traffic system, the health of a patient, or the healthof a loan portfolio, reacting faster gives you an advantage. Velocity is perhapsone of the most overlooked areas in the Big Data craze, and one inwhich we believe that IBM is unequalled in the capabilities and sophisticationthat it provides.In the Big Data craze that has taken the marketplace by storm, everyoneis fixated on at-rest analytics, using optimized engines such the Netezzatechnology behind the IBM PureData System for Analytics or Hadoop toperform analysis that was never before possible, at least not at such a largescale. Although this is vitally important, we must nevertheless ask: “Howdo you analyze data in motion?” This capability has the potential to providebusinesses with the highest level of differentiation, yet it seems to be somewhatoverlooked. The IBM InfoSphere Streams (Streams) part of the IBM Big Dataplatform provides a real-time streaming data analytics engine. Streams is aplatform that provides fast, flexible, and scalable processing of continuousstreams of time-sequenced data packets. We’ll delve into the details andcapabilities of Streams in Part III, “Analytics for Big Data in Motion.”You might be thinking that velocity can be handled by Complex EventProcessing (CEP) systems, and although they might seem applicable on thesurface, in the Big Data world, they fall very short. Stream processing enablesadvanced analysis across diverse data types with very high messaging datarates and very low latency (µs to s). For example, one financial services sector(FSS) client analyzes and correlates over five million market messages/second to execute algorithmic option trades with an average latency of 30microseconds. Another client analyzes over 500,000 Internet protocol detailrecords (IPDRs) per second, more than 6 billion IPDRs per day, on more than4PB of data per year, to understand the trending and current-state health of theirnetwork. Consider an enterprise network security problem. In this domain,threats come in microseconds so you need technology that can respond andkeep pace. However you also need something that can capture lots of data