1. DECEMBER 2015
AN INDEPENDENT SUPPLEMENT DISTRIBUTED IN THE GUARDIAN ON BEHALF OF MEDIAPLANET WHO TAKE SOLE RESPONSIBILITY FOR ITS CONTENTS
BigDataFUTUREOFTECH.CO.UK
PHOTO: TECHUK
ONLINE AT
FUTUREOFTECH.CO.UK
MarkRoyonhowBig
Datahelpsbrandsfocus
onbettertargeting
techUKCEO
JulianDavid
OnhowtheUKcan
fulfilitsBigData
potential

2. 2 FUTUREOFTECH.CO.UK MEDIAPLANETAN INDEPENDENT SUPPLEMENT BY MEDIAPLANET
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Kognitio_Guardian_BigData_201x90.pdf 1 27/11/2015 18:11:59
READ MORE ON FUTUREOFTECH.CO.UK
Cloud industry
Alex Hilton on the
transformative
properties of
hybrid cloud
solutions
P4
Saul Judah
Three expert
recommendations
for eliminating
unnecessary
business processes
P6
Business
Intelligence
A piece from
Innovation Enterprise
on the need to harness
the potential of
Business Intelligence
IN THIS ISSUE
Security safeguards key to big
data growth
There is significant economic potential in big data, but changes are needed to unlock it
Please recycleFollow us facebook.com/MediaplanetUK @MediaplanetUK
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Project Manager: Octavian Donnelly E-mail: octavian.donnelly@mediaplanet.com Mediaplanet contact info: Phone: +44 (0) 203 642 0737 E-mail: info.uk@mediaplanet.com
T
he impor-
tance of
Big Data
to the UK
was con-
firmed in
2012 when it was recog-
nised by the Government
as one of the 8 Great Tech-
nologies vital to the eco-
nomic and social future of
the UK. Big Data is a cata-
lyst for economic growth,
a key tool in achieving long
term productivity, essential
for job creation and vital to
maintaining the UK’s global
position as a digital society.
The UK has a fantastic op-
portunity to be a world-
leader in Big Data, and is
making steady progress.
However, we must do
more to highlight the so-
cial and economic oppor-
tunities and mitigate risks
facing the development
of Big Data technologies
in the UK.
To successfully unlock the
value of big data, we must
improve public trust in
Julian David
CEO, techUK
“We must improve
public trust in how
their personal data
is collected”
how their personal data is
collected, stored and used,
particularly given the grow-
ing cyber threat.
Having in place a legal
framework that allows
for business innovation
while also protecting per-
sonal information is cru-
cial. The new General Da-
ta Protection Regulation
(GDPR) in development
in the European Commis-
sion has the potential to
underpin consumer trust
and confidence. However, if
European policy-makers
do not properly consider
certain aspects, this could
have a chilling effect on
the growth of Big Data
industries in Europe.
The potential for Big Data
is huge. The Centre for
Economics & Business
Research estimated that by
2017 Big Data could contrib-
ute £216 billion and gener-
ate 58,000 new jobs in the
UKandIreland.Wemustget
it right.
@MediaplanetUK

3. FUTUREOFTECH.CO.UK 3MEDIAPLANET AN INDEPENDENT SUPPLEMENT BY MEDIAPLANET
I
nformation. Intel-
ligence. Data. Call it
what you want, but
every savvy com-
pany needs it, be-
cause — used properly — it
can provide valuable in-
sight that increases business
productivity, profitability
andsecurity.
Machine-generated data
is one of the fastest-grow-
ing and most complex areas
of Big Data. “Mobile phones,
application logs, network
infrastructure, cloud ser-
vices, sensors in cars and
planes — all of these things
and more generate ma-
chine data,” says Matthew
Davies, Head of Marketing at
operational intelligence plat-
form,Splunk.
“This is important infor-
mation that can help a
company deliver superi-
or IT operational analytics
and enhance its real time se-
curity intelligence; plus it
can pinpoint what a busi-
ness’ customers are doing
and how its products are per-
forming. Once our custom-
ers see what is possible with
machine data, they immedi-
atelyseethebenefitofit.”
Solutions
The problem is, machine-
generated data is not easily
accessible.Splunk saw an op-
portunity as well as a need to
make machine data accessi-
ble, usable and valuable, and
develop solutions that allow
machine-generated data to
be easily collected, indexed,
searched and visualised. An
expertinitsfield,Splunknow
has more than 10,000 cus-
tomersacrosstheworld,from
flying doctors in the Aus-
tralian outback - who use its
solutions to monitor the
temperatures of medicines
and locations of planes - to
blue chip companies such as
UniCredit, John Lewis,Voda-
foneandTesco.
UniCredit, for instance,
uses Splunk Enterprise
for real-time insights into
operational data and key
business metrics. The bank
has improved the experi-
ence it offers customers by
reducing services down-
time and provides vis-
ibility into key business
metrics such as served cli-
ents by bank branches, in-
ternet banking and mo-
bile banking channels, and
number of new opened
bank accounts.
Versatile
John Lewis also uses Splunk,
in order to monitor its web-
site and customer journey to
ensure an excellent customer
Machine-generateddataisoneofthemostcomplexandfastestgrowingareasofbigdata–anditcangive
businessesacompetitiveedge
Bringingbigvaluetomachinedata
COMMERCIAL FEATURE
experience; and Domino’s
pizza uses Splunk to support
its e-commerce environ-
ment, by studying e-com-
merce logs, troubleshooting
issues, assisting with moni-
toring, providing feedback
to developers and deliv-
ering real-time insights
tomarketing.
“Increasingly, companies
are experiencing big ‘busi-
ness moments’,” says
Matthew Davies. “For in-
stance, a company might be
about to have a major outage
because a data base has run
out of memory.Machine data
provides insight in real time
so that problems like these
can be fixed faster, customer
experiences can be improved
protection can be provided
against a security attack,
and money can be saved.
That’s why it’s so vital in a
competitiveworld.”
“Machine-
generated
data is one
of the fastest
growing
and most
complex
areas of
Big Data”
Matthew Davies
Head of marketing,
Splunk

4. INSPIRATION
EXPERT TIPS
Sue Daley
Head of Programme for
Big Data, Cloud & Mobile,
techUK
Read more at
futureoftech.co.uk
A
ccording to our latest re-
search on the state of
UK Cloud market, 84 per
cent of organisations
currently use at least one
Cloud service, up from
48 per cent in 2010. Moreover, 78 per cent
of those organisations use two or more
services, a significant increase on the
same figure recorded in 2014, highlight-
ing how the delivery model is making its
presence felt in businesses today.
This growth story owes much to the fact
that Cloud services are having a profound
impact on the design and delivery of organ-
isations’ IT capabilities and, as a result, on
the performance and flexibility of their busi-
nesses thereafter.At its heart,the concept of
Cloudisallaboutorganisationaltransforma-
tion though the agile on-demand delivery of
ITsolutions;itisnotsomuchaboutthetech-
nologyitself.Cloudistransformingtheways
thatbusinessescommunicateinternallyand
with their customers, providing more flex-
ible and faster access to technology, reduc-
ing capital expenditure and shaving healthy
amountsoffofoverallITspends.
ButwhatisclearisthatCloudisbutonepart
of an increasingly complex and diverse pic-
ture. Although penetration has increased
year-on-year,and indeed,faster thanwe had
anticipated, Cloud-based solutions still con-
stitute a relatively small part of the wider
IT estate and half of organisations expect to
keep specific applications and services on-
premise indefinitely. This, by no means, is
to suggest that appetite for Cloud is on the
wane; more a reflection of the fact that not
everything can or should be migrated.With
this being the case,the majority of organisa-
tionswill be maintaining Hybrid ITenviron-
mentsfortheforeseeablefuture.
Cloud computing is playing an increasingly
important role in businesses across the country,
regardless of their organisational size or the sector
they operate in, as business leaders turn to Cloud
services to transform their IT estates
HowHybrid
Cloudsitsatthe
heartofbusiness
transformation
4 FUTUREOFTECH.CO.UK AN INDEPENDENT SUPPLEMENT BY MEDIAPLANET
Theroleof
analytics
Big Data analytics provide UK businesses with
the opportunity to combine, consolidate and
then analyse large datasets to find previously
hidden insights and knowledge. For example,
by identifying patterns in customer behaviour,
common customer likes and dislikes and previ-
ously unknown customer requirements busi-
nesses can develop personalised goods and ser-
vices based on consumers’ needs andwants.
OveralltheadoptionofBigDatabyUKbusiness-
es, of all size and sector, is being driven not only
by the ability to be more responsive to custom-
ers but also as a driver of operational efficiencies,
cost reductions, increased agility and as a tool
for gaining a single view of the lifecycle of data
across an organisation and its supply chain.

5. HybridITis hardly anew phenomenonas
it relates to the co-existence of multiple IT
deployment models –which has been true
for most businesses since the move away
from mainframes in the 1980s. But most
causes of a hybrid environment have his-
torically been the product of a transition
processratherthananexplicitordeliberate
strategy.Arguablythisisnolongerthecase
andweareseeingHybridITestatesemerge
bydesign.
Fromabusinesspointofview,suchanap-
proach to IT is a useful one. Rather than
charging full-throttle towards one type of
infrastructure, businesses are now able to
pick and choose the types of IT that they
feel most comfortable with, and that are
most appropriate for their individual ap-
plications. Embracing a hybrid approach
givesbusinessestheflexibilitytoconstruct
an IT estate that will feed into the needs
of the organisation, evolving as-and-
when required.This bottom-up evolu-
tionaryapproachremovesmanyofthe
risksofgrandall-encompassingITpro-
jects,which tend to be expensive, dif-
ficulttocoordinateandslowtoreactto
changingbusinessrequirements.
CloudisaprovenITdeploymentmod-
el, but for most organisations it is one
ofmanythat willbeused.Thebenefits
of adopting Cloud alongside on-prem-
ise are proven and Hybrid ITis a natu-
ral and unstoppable evolution in the
IT landscape, which will serve to en-
hance business outcomes with
the continued investment of time
andinnovation.
“Cloud is
transforming
the ways that
businesses
communicate
internally and
with their
customers”
Read the full story
futureoftech.
co.uk
MEDIAPLANET 5AN INDEPENDENT SUPPLEMENT BY MEDIAPLANET
Alex Hilton
CEO, Cloud Industry
Forum
COLUMN
Dr Tony Venus
Head of Standards and
Qualifications, Tech
Partnership
Tomorrow’s
dataanalysts
N
early 90 per cent of em-
ployers identify data
analysis as a core skills
gap, according to Tech
Partnership research.
And with big data often cited as ‘the new
oil’ – the fuel for the economy over future
decades–thisshortagematters.
Filling those gaps needs a multifaceted
approach, but apprenticeships are an in-
creasingly popular way to attract
and train talented people. Tech Partner-
ship employers have recently developed
data analyst apprenticeship standards
which, if approved, will be available
from 2016. And the new Degree
Apprenticeshipscanincludeadataanaly-
sis specialism, giving participants an
academic training while immersing
theminabusinessenvironment.
PHOTO: ISHBONES

6. 6 FUTUREOFTECH.CO.UK MEDIAPLANETAN INDEPENDENT SUPPLEMENT BY MEDIAPLANET
COLUMN
George Hill
Managing editor and
online director, Innovation
Enterprise
Utilisethepotentialof
BusinessIntelligence
tocreate competitive
advantage
The Ancient Greeks would use early
examples of coins to buy and sell, then
keep ledgers to keep a record of every-
thing they had traded that day. Early
homosapiens would paint pictures in caves to
show how many animals had been hunted that
day. Even Herodotus, arguably the first histori-
an, claims that there were tablets on the Pyra-
mids at Giza describing how many radishes, on-
ions and garlic had been consumed.
All of these are forms of business intelligence,
but not in the way we know it today.
In 2015 we have hundreds of Terabytes of
data to investigate how our businesses are
performing and what we can do to improve
performance. It may be several million times
more complex than in ancient times, but the
truth is that the businesses who utilise it, do so
for the same reasons: business success.
From the ways that data can help retailers
stock, sell and profit, through to how Google
and Facebook can make billions through user
data, it dictates every business decision today.
We learn about the inner workings of how
companies use their data due to our exten-
sive network of industry summits that we hold
across the world.We have one in London on
10th May, Big Data Innovation London. If you
were interested in finding out more about
how the world’s most successful companies
utilise their data, why not have a look?
the right data is provided to
the right person (or thing) in
the right time or place does
it become valuable. It’s not
how bigyour data is,it’swhat
you do with it.
The continued rise of digital
and information-based busi-
ness models will cause cas-
ualties in traditional indus-
tries, particularly among the
incumbents that are not pre-
pared for the digital world.
Gartner offers three key
recommendations for busi-
ness executives and infor-
mation leaders: start identi-
fying potential data-fuelled
disruptions, create an infor-
mation management strat-
egy and lastly, embed your
information strategy in the
heart of your business strat-
egy and governance process-
es. Only once you determine
what information can im-
pact your business strategy
and how you plan to collect
and organise it, are you in a
position to harness it effec-
tively. This could take the
form of self-service ana-
lytics, where employees in
different business units can
perform queries and gener-
ate analytical insights on the
company data most relevant
to their areas of expertise,
without necessarily need-
ing IT support or a degree in
data science.
An organisation with em-
ployees who are empowered
to experiment with and
learn from information and
analytics is one positioned
to innovate and capture rev-
enue from new trends and
markets. A coherent infor-
mation framework and
strategy is the means by
which companies can turn
data’s potential into com-
petitive advantage and prof-
it — the means to take con-
trol of and harness innova-
tion rather than be swept
away by it.
Threerecommendations
for the information age
NEWS
The adage “knowledge
is power” is not new, yet
is increasingly valid in a
world where businesses
ponder how to harness
the unprecedented
volume and velocity of
data around us.
Gartner predicts that by 2020,
informationwill be used to re-
invent, digitalise or eliminate
80 per cent of all business
processes and products from
a decade earlier. The likes of
Uber and Airbnb demonstrate
how companies that simply
broker information can revo-
lutionise an industry without
owning any physical assets.
The huge success of such
companies is not just luck
or good timing. Underneath
outwardly simple business
models lies serious expertise
in managing data and har-
nessing its power. Data on
its own has potential, but is
inherently dumb. Only when
By Saul Judah, research director, Gartner

7. MEDIAPLANET 7AN INDEPENDENT SUPPLEMENT BY MEDIAPLANET
COMMERCIAL FEATURE
O
ne of the big-
gest issues
facing finance
houses today
centres on
running credit checks on
the client without causing
unnecessary complica-
tions for said client and one
increasingly successful way
to do this is to work with
smart data as opposed to big
data. One company that is
doing this is Creamfinance,
an online consumer finance
company that caters to near
prime consumers and that
was founded in 2012 in Lat-
via. It has subsequently expe-
rienced exponential growth,
expanding into Poland,
where its headquarters now
are, the Czech Republic, Slo-
vakia, Georgia and Austria,
where its IT system is based.
Unique Offering
“Creamfinance doesn’t
compete with banks: we
are providing smaller and
more convenient loans for
the consumer,” says Matiss
Ansviesulis, co-founder and
CEO of the company. “Our
business has expanded very
fast across different geo-
graphies because it is based
on technology that is about
managing the process of
approval for loans scoring
for clients and this can be
rolled out across borders
to different countries.” He
points out that while five of
the countries Creamfinance
operates in are members of
the EU, Georgia is not, a clear
indication that the business
model has the potential to
expand the company much
further still.
Understanding the options
Creamfinance provides three
types of loans: instalment
loans allowing customers
to borrow, say, €2,000 over
24 months and pay back the
capital and interest in mon-
thly instalments over two
years; lines of credit, which
are similar to a bank over-
draft and allow customers
to draw the credit they need
on a revolving basis and also
have a time limit; and small
loans. These will typically be
for a few hundred euros and
will be repayable within the
month, but although they
sound similar to the widely
criticised payday loans in
the UK, they are in fact quite
different. In much of Europe,
interest and regulation on
this type of loan is much
more tightly regulated than
has been the case in the UK.
Credit Risk
What these three types of
loan and indeed any type
of loan have in common,
of course, is that it is vital
to assess the credit risk of
the would-be lendee. Tradi-
tionally this has been done
through concentrating on a
process known as big data:
“This focuses on volume and
velocity, the size of the data
and how fast it can be pro-
cessed,” says Ansviesulis.
However, not only can this
be time consuming and labo-
rious: it can also frustrating
for the client who might have
to fill out pages of informa-
tion and then have to wait
for an answer. One of the rea-
sons behind Creamfinance’s
success is that it utilises a
different and considerably
more streamlined process
known as smart data.
Ensuring Accuracy
“We are much more
concerned with the value
and the accuracy of the data
we’re getting,” says Ansvie-
sulis. “We’re focused not on
getting as much data as pos-
sible but looking for data that
is valuable while ensuring
it is still accurate. For exa-
mple, we check with credit
rating bureaus to see if there
are unpaid loans or, say,
utility bills, but we also have
to check to make sure the
data is not obsolete.”
That not only speeds up the
process for Creamfinance,
but it makes life considerably
easier for the clients as well.
“The overriding feature of
what we provide is conve-
nience,” says Ansviesulis.
“We’re stripping away the
nonsense so many customers
have to go through and we
want to make it as simple
as possible, so clients can
get their loans with just one
click. Even now, it is still
difficult to get a loan and
the consumers don’t care if
they’re using a bank or not:
they care about the price and
convenience.”
Delivering on Promises
The success of Creamfi-
nance’s approach speaks for
itself. “For companies that
use big data as their driving
strategy, the client needs to
give a lot of information, fill
out a lot of forms and there’s
a big gap between what big
data promises and what it
delivers,” he says. “But we
are in the process of delive-
ring a prototype that sticks to
what we know and delivers
one click convenience. Smart
data is still not so mains-
tream but the value of what
it delivers is much higher
than big data. It actually
really works.”
Matiss Ansviesulis
Co-founder and CEO,
Creamfinance
PHOTO:CREAMFINANCE
By Virginia Blackburn
Companies using a smarter
way to gather their data