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Danyll Wills

The information explosion on the mainland is creating big opportunities for data-mining software and storage companies

Over the next two years people   will create more data than has been generated during the past 40,000 years of humanity.

Much of this comes from the business systems of western enterprises, but as China plays an ever-growing role in the global economy, its contribution to the information overload will also increase.

This is creating opportunities for companies such as Teradata,  which helps enterprises make sense of their information with data mining software, and Network Appliance, a manufacturer of storage solutions.

'With data doubling or tripling each year, many describe their situation as 'drowning in data',' said Mark Hurd,  chief executive of NCR, which started Teradata 25 years ago.

Mr Hurd hopes Teradata can  do for data mining what NCR has done for the ATM: lead the market in China.

'A big issue for us in China is to get the transaction data under control,' he said.

As China does more and more business, it is amassing huge amounts of data. 'We are now way up in terms of headcount  in China and I believe Teradata is going to do as well as the ATM business for us,' Mr Hurd said.

Of course, data is not knowledge, and there are two problems which companies face in tackling the huge amounts of information they generate. One is making sense of the terabytes and petabytes of text, sound and image in order to make decisions. The other is automating those decisions.

Teradata began helping executives make decisions 25 years ago.

'Back in 1979, Teradata was founded for one thing and one thing only: decision support, as it was called then,' Mr Hurd said.

At that time, people did not reuse data and that was almost revolutionary, he said. Secretaries spent hours typing things that got stored away, never to be used again. Teradata changed all that.

In Hong Kong, David Boyle,  principal at Clyde & Pearl, a local business consultancy, said a certain amount of decision making was already automated.

'Many business decisions are already taken automatically - decisions about suspending credit, for example, or replenishing stock. More data and advanced data manipulation will mean more opportunities for automation and the competition created in more efficient markets will mean more need for it,' Mr Boyle said.

'But for strategic decisions that commit significant resources and are hard to reverse, we'll still want to know that a human being is in the circuit.'

One area that all this touches on is knowledge management.

Hong Kong Knowledge Management Society president Waltraut Ritter  said making sense of information depended on the tools.

'From a [knowledge management] point of view, the question is not about the availability of huge data and information repositories ... but the bottleneck of sense-making tools. Some argue that only humans can make sense of information and understand the context,' she said.

'Having tons of data and information doesn't provide much help in decision-making processes unless you have people with the right skills to analyse it.'

When one looks at the most populous nation on earth and its extraordinary growth, it is easy to imagine China would be a key market for this kind of technology.

'We think China is a fantastic market. There is a lot of investment. We not only bring technology to China, we also bring the ability to solve problems,' Mr Hurd said.

'The education system in China is great. The CEOs I meet there are great. I was talking to a CEO in Beijing recently and he said to me: 'What I need is an enterprise data model'. That was truly fantastic. No American CEO would say that.'

Network Appliance  North Asia managing director Andrew Hu  said the central government had many projects to deal with the massive amounts of data the country was producing.

There were e-government projects, digital library projects, a 'Digital City' project connected to the Beijing Olympic Games of 2008, as well as what was being produced by multinationals in China.

'The [central] government is pushing for the implementation of key e-government projects to streamline inter-government processes,' Mr Hu said.

'They are also thinking about systems that will make it easier for the government to interact with people. Over the next four years or so, China will be handling  enormous amounts of data and will need technology to handle it.'

Teradata has built itself a niche market dealing with data warehousing and data mining, but  database giant Oracle believes it too has been helped by the recent surge in data.

Tony Banham,  senior director, global customer programs, Oracle Asia Pacific, said  Oracle had a model that could put it in perspective.

'The importance of historical data in decision making has driven a huge data warehouse market in Oracle's direction. However, Oracle's applications complement this by providing a single global data model - covering every aspect of a business - allowing executives to base decisions on live operational data, too,' he said.

Mr Hurd was confident his company could do much in China.

'We think the confluence of size, industry, people and talent in China is tremendous. We are doing a lot of business there and we are constantly growing the customer list,' he said.

Bigger bytes

Kilobyte (KB)  Two kilobytes:  a typewritten page.

Megabyte (MB)  1,000,000 bytes OR 106 bytes.  Five megabytes: the complete works of Shakespeare.

Gigabyte (GB)  1,000,000,000 bytes OR 109 bytes.  20 gigabytes: a good collection of the works of Beethoven.

Terabyte (TB)  1,000,000,000,000 bytes OR 1012 bytes. 10 terabytes: the print collections of the US Library of Congress.

Petabyte (PB)  1,000,000,000,000,000 bytes OR 1015 bytes. 20 petabytes: production of hard-disk drives in 1995. 200 petabytes: All printed material.

Exabyte (EB)  1,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes or 1018 bytes. Five exabytes: all words ever spoken by human beings.

Source: Data powers of Ten by Roy Williams, California Institute of Technology



Data overload to intensify as China continues to grow