We are flooded with an almost infinite number of data streams these days. From traditional sources such as registration and consumer purchasing platforms to social media feeds, tweets and Instagram updates, the amount of new data being created and disseminated is almost endless.

Open source big data technologies like Hadoop have done much to begin the transformation of analytics. We're moving from expensive and specialist analytics teams towards an environment in which processes, workflows, and decision-making throughout an organization can--in theory at least--become usefully data-driven.