2013 will be the year of Big Data. You may have heard this, too. And up to a certain point, it’s true: with the number of PoCs we’ve seen this year, 2013 will indeed be the year of many Big Data deployments. But certainly not at the rate vendors and systems integrators would have hoped for. The reason is simple: companies don’t want Big Data.

Of course, they need to handle larger volumes of data. Of course, they need to process it faster. But these are the kinds of issues traditional techniques can solve, by adding bandwidth, more powerful CPUs, cheaper memory, or even complex event processing or stream processing.

These are not areas where Big Data proves to be a real innovation. Which is a shame, as Big Data can really bring a new and innovative value in the Business Intelligence world. In that sense, Big Data would be a game changer for a number of companies, and thus a real business driver for vendors and systems integrators.

The thing is, companies are not looking for Big Data technologies. They’re looking for business outcomes. You may of course find CIOs who are implementing so-called “Big Data” technologies in order to get prepared to all kind of requests made by their users. But most of the companies – at least those I can see and talk to in France – think in terms of business issues: how to evaluate the impact of a specific event, how to know how many products I should manufacture, how to prevent a shortage…

In our view, “Big Data” vendors will only succeed if they address business outcomes. Whether their Big Data solutions solve only 2 Vs (Velocity and Volume) or 3 Vs (with Variety, including unstructured content like tweets, blog posts, website logs…), they must make sure they meet a real demand.

The best-designed Ferrari engine won’t address a farmer’s challenges as a fully-equipped tractor can do. If vendors stick to this technology-provider attitude, then systems integrators have a real opportunity to add value to their offerings, by designing real-life solutions leveraging these technologies.

(By the way, don’t miss our webinar “Embracing the Big Data opportunity” on Dec, 13th)