Driven by well-documented success of internet giants in the mass distribution, retail, and internet marketing sector, most companies now recognize the importance of using Big data Technologies (BDT) to improve their business performance. Unfortunately, given the relative novelty of the technologies most organisations rely on their technology providers not only to help them implement these technologies, but also to assess the performance of the tools they are using. The understanding of the technical underpinnings and their transposition into organizational goals through the results that can be achieved are not strong within the organisations. Even many of the technology providers understand the technical proficiency of their tools but often lack the possibility (or incentive) to benchmark their tools against alternative solutions. There is on one hand, a lack of recognized benchmarking tools to evaluate performance of technologies; and on the other, a disjunct or separation between the tools and the business objectives of the companies where these tools are expected to be implemented.
The overall objective of the DataBench Research and Innovation Action is to provide benchmarks and performance evaluation mechanisms to identify business impact and industrial significance in Big Data Technologies (BDT) benchmarking providing operational support to the BDV PPP and the European Big Data industry. DataBench will provide a tool to quickly guide organisations to find the correct benchmarking process, execute performance measurement and associate the measurements to the business processes which they are expecting BDT to measure and improve. This will help European organisations developing BDT to measure their technology development and compare it to recognized parameters of high business relevance. The expected outcome is the improvement of European companies competitiveness through the selection and implementation of the most advantageous BDT solutions.
To achieve this overall goal DataBench has persued the following six functional objectives:
1 Provide the BDT stakeholder communities with a comprehensive framework to integrate business and technical benchmarking approaches for Big Data Technologies.
2 Perform economic and market analysis to assess the “European economic significance” of benchmarking tools and performance parameters.
3 Evaluate the business impacts of BDT benchmarks of performance parameters of industrial significance.
4 Develop a tool applying methodologies to determine optimal BDT benchmarking approaches.
5 Evaluation of the DataBench Framework and Toolbox in representative industries, data experimentation/integration initiatives (ICT-14) and Large-Scale Pilots (ICT-15).
6 Liaise closely with the Big Data Value Association (BDVA), ICT-14, -15 projects to build consensus and reach out to key industrial communities, to ensure that benchmarking responds to real needs and problems.
