Bill Schmarzo, CTO of EMC’s EIM Services, is called the “Dean of Big Data,” mostly because of his role in EMC’s data science training courses. Today at Strata Conference Schmarzo appeared on theCube with hosts John Furrier and Dave Vellante to talk about how data science is transforming business, and talked in particular about how the emerging discipline both threatens business intelligence specialists and creates new opportunities for them.

Dave points out that BI has traditionally been focused on reporting, and that business are trying to get beyond reporting. KPI reports often just aren’t fresh enough. Schmarzo says that businesses will eventually throw out some technologies of the past, it probably doesn’t mean they’re going to throw all of their BusinessObject dashboards.

Schmarzo says that BI specialists have a lot of knowledge and skills related to deriving business benefit out of data. BI specialists have been analyzing metrics like key performance indicators for years. Data scientists that are coming from a natural science background are learning the business side of data from scratch. Schmarzo says BI specialists have the opportunity to apply predictive analytics and real-time intelligence to “supercharge” their BI work and create more business value.

BI specialists know their businesses, Schmarzo says, the real issue is that they don’t necessarily know what’s possible. They don’t know how they can use social media data to improve customer acquisition, for example. He says the ability to surface data science insights in traditional BI tools will be huge. The problem isn’t how to something, it’s what to do.

Schmarzo suggests starting with “low hanging fruit” to prove business value and to learn about the tool sand what’s possible.

Services Angle

The issues of knowing what questions is one that comes up over and over when talking about big data. From smaller, newer services companies like InfoChimps to behemoths like IBM and EMC, what I keep hearing is that although there a few advanced customers out there, most companies just need to know where to start with big data and predictive analytics.