Business organisations have been collecting customer data since time immemorial; whether on clay tablets, papyrus and subsequently paper. With the advent of computerisation most business organisations found themselves maintaining electronic systems designed and built to store and accumulate ever-growing amounts of raw customer data. Due to the way computer applications were then designed, it was not always easy to aggregate different systems, and the data they respectively stored, in an attempt to construct a single, unified, view of the customer.

What is Big Data? What differentiates it from any other data? In reality, the answer is as simple as pure volume. Big Data is a self-explanatory term. What sets it apart from other data are the methods which we use to analyse it. Smaller scale data can be analysed using some functions and perhaps even by hand, but the larger your data the more difficult it will become to do that. We require specific tools and methodologies both to properly store the data as well as to get the most value out of it.

Talend Integration Cloud is a product within the Integration Platform-as-a-Service (iPaaS) space that makes it even easier for customers to build and deploy integration patterns in the Cloud. Having a simple, yet complete, Cloud-based Customer Data Warehouse (CDW) is key to any organization and the ability to manage, integrate and understand the collected Data is of paramount importance.

In the world of web 2.0 and industry 4.0, organizations that are flexible when it comes to  adopting new technologies and changing their business model are better equipped to grow sustainably than their rigid counterparts. Business analytics is one such source of strategic value; converting data into actionable insights and profitable actions.