Here at Internet Retailer we see plenty of e-commerce jargon and
marketing talk cross our PC monitors, but some buzzwords prove
harder to translate than others. Big data is one of those.
Everyone has heard of it, but not many believe they can define
it—and those who do often disagree with each other on what it
means. At Wikibon, a professional online community of
technologists from many industries, a manifesto about big data
includes this definition: "Underlying every business analytics
practice is data. Traditionally, this means structured data
created and stored by enterprises themselves, such as customer
data housed in CRM applications, operational data stored in ERP
systems or financial data tallied in accounting databases. But
the volume and type of data now available to enterprises — and
the need to analyze it in near-real time for maximum business
value — is growing rapidly thanks to the popularity of social
media and networking services like Facebook and Twitter, data-
generating censored and networked