“We see customers stopping Hadoop deployment after a pilot because they don’t understand the roles that Hadoop, Autonomy, structured and unstructured data all will play,” says Tom Norton, director of the Technology Consulting Portfolio at HP Technology Services. This puts their companies at a huge competitive advantage, regardless of their vertical markets. “Businesses making decisions around analytical data are growing faster than those making decisions solely on past experience,” he told SiliconAngle CEO John Furrier and Wikibon CEO David Vellante in the Cube at HP Discover in Frankfurt, Germany, December 4, 2012. “Data analytics allows businesses to grow in challenging times.”

The problem, he says, is “they get stopped at the integration point.” They ask HP consulting questions like, “How much data and compute power do I need today and in the future?”

In response, HP helps them map those needs and shows them how Hadoop, Vertica, and Autonomy fit together and how they can combine their structured data with unstructured information to provide better answers to business questions.

“Mobile comes up every time in these discussions,” he says. Mobile users want immediate access to information and analysis based on something they ask. They say, “I need information on X.” That can include market information, internal information, and also social information.” The big challenge today in Big Data is combining those effectively. “The more we can spend on integration models, the better we serve customers.”