Why ‘doing it yourself’ can be worse than not doing it at all… Business leaders are, by their very nature, DIYers. That’s not to say they spend every spare moment prowling the office corridors, spanner in hand: even the most sanguine of entrepreneurs would draw the line at servicing the company boiler. (Well, hopefully.) 

How the world’s leading auction site is transforming terabytes of raw data into valuable business insight: helping it better understand its customers, improve satisfaction levels, and maximise sellers’ profitable revenues… At any given point in time, with around 350 million items listed for sale, eBay stands or falls on its ability to harness, analyse and draw meaningful conclusions from 10 petabytes of raw data it holds in its Hadoop clusters.

“Content Is King” It was the 3rd of January 1996 when Bill Gates coined the phrase ‘Content is King’.

Effectively harnessing the enormous quantities of data your business accumulates day-to-day can help you get ‘up close and personal’ with your customer base – delivering razor-honed messages and offers directly to the most narrowly defined ‘micro’ market segments. It’s over three decades since former Hewlett Packard CEO Lew Platt remarked, “If only HP knew what it knows, it would make three times more profit tomorrow.”