Limiting Big Data to things like telcom is the same error as folks who once thought .html was a pretty exercise on the descendant of ARPANET. And that became what we call now "The Internet".
Big Data, in fact, IS data analysis. From many sources, it is really "Big Analysis". For all of us, it's essentially the power to know who is shopping for what and when, and then to tie that with trending data, purchase data, historical data, and predictive data to render the best offer to a shopper possible.
Big Data is bigger than THAT, but that's a decent simplification for our industry. And I may be somewhat uniquely qualified to consider this new tool, in that I spent from 1983 to 2001 in Fortune 50 high tech, from engineering to marketing to sales. And so I see the potential for the tool of Big Data in the commercial sense, and I see the risk for the tool in the personal sense--and I do believe that, knowledge being power, then someone having great knowledge of you they might gain great power.
However, I can't stop it, and I can try and use Big Data to render the best commercial retail car-buying experience for a consumer that I can. That's my focus in all this, and I'm excited for the products I know that render a lot of help in that. Because, truth be told, if the data is there, we need to improve the buying experience for our customers using it.
Thanks!
