“The customers I talk to don’t care about Hadoop,” EMC CTO Bill Schmarzo, whom SiliconAngle Founder John Furrier dubbed “the dean of Big Data”, said in an October 2, 2012 interview webcast from the Cube in the QLogic booth at Oracle OpenWorld. “Hadoop is just part of the technology stack that helps them get value out of all these new data sources. Some of our users are drunk with the data that’s available to them.”

The conversation has changed over the past year, he said. No longer is he explaining the technology, Instead, conversations focus on business enablement, how the business can combine new data types and sources outside the organization with traditional internal structured information to gain competitive advantage in the marketplace. “They are taking a serious look at leveraging the wealth of information inside and outside the organization to get more insight into their business and the markets they compete in.”

In another year, he predicts, “we will be talking about real use cases of companies from mid-America gaining business advantage from Big Data.”

This is good news for companies like EMC and for the startups working to develop new kinds of analytics to use with this data. However, he said, it may not be as good for most traditional BI companies.

“It is a matter of mindset,” he said. “Most of those companies are just focused on making their sales quotas with their present products. They have been bought by big companies and refocused on retaining their customer base. They have very little motivation to develop new products beyond their static, backward-looking dashboards.”

As a result they are in grave danger of being left behind as companies move to predictive rather than traditional “rear view mirror” analytics. Big data is being leveraged by leading edge companies and service providers to predict what the market wants and identify specific actions a company can take that give it a high chance of influencing and in some cases changing its market in the future. The presumption that next year’s or next month’s or even next week’s business environment will be the same as last quarter’s, and that therefore an analysis of what happened then can guide the business now, is no longer safe.

“What gets me excited is talking with people about business problems they are trying to solve,” he said. For instance, he had a conversation with an insurance company executive who wants to analyze each household the company insures separately to determine the individual risk profile of each insured individual. “When the conversation moves from a science experiment to technology as an enabler to solve business problems it gets exciting.”