This is part of a special series by Fairfax Business Media Asia previewing speakers at the CIO Summit 2012.

K. R. Sanjiv is the senior vice president and global head for Analytics & Information Management, Wipro Technologies. He carries P&L responsibility, strategy and operations of this unit globally reporting to the CEO. In an exclusive interview with CIO Asia, he talks about the importance and applications of Big Data.

Business intelligence (BI) and analytics have been there for sometime. Big Data is relatively new. How is Big Data different from BI and analytics?

It is not something that is distinct and different. In fact, what Big Data brings to conventional BI and analytics is kind of a different way of doing these things. You have, over the last 10-15 years, people doing analytics. For example, the retail guys were doing analytics in terms of customer segmentation, customer priorities, etc., and BI was being done as a typical drill down-slicing data and looking at it. All that is changing drastically.

You can compare it to some of the changes that have happened over the last couple of decades. What client server did to the whole architecture of computing, or what the Internet or Web did-the change is almost of the same magnitude.

Fundamentally, what is changing is that it (Big Data) is a combination of the amount of valuable data available today that these organisations have access to, probably holding within their organisations, (that is) not being leveraged. Combine it with the fact that there are huge business pressures to outperform competition and also the fact that the resources have become very expensive, so you cannot have the luxury to spend money on campaigns or marketing and all these initiatives, so you get a real bang for the buck.  You can't be wasting money either operationally or from a demand generation perspective. You have to make every rupee count. That sort of business pressure is driving it (Big Data).

And the final catalyst is the new technology (that) is coming in-the Big Data technologies such as in-memory computing, the appliances, etc. Combine these factors and you are on the cusp of a huge transformation that will take place in the data and BI and analytics. Basically, it will get into an extreme analytics and organisations pretty much across the industry and across the globe are seeing that it is the number one spending which people are looking at, sometimes even unrealistically, as a solution to their problems.

How can businesses harness Big Data to drive business success?

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