from techcrunch:

over the past few years, most of us who work at mid to large-sized companies have seen our productivity multiply because of big data and saas applications. but small businesses have not experienced the same benefits. rather, they have been left in the dark, trying to understand what drives their business and make adjustments. in 2013, this will change.

i witnessed first-hand the impact of big bata and saas on enterprises when i was a senior marketing manager at facebook leading their smb marketing team. my team and i accessed vast amounts of data that covered who my customers were, how they behaved on our site, and how much they spent on our advertising products. the data was accessible to us through an in-house data warehousing layer of our hadoop clusters, called hive, which made querying facebook’s massive quantities of data easy.

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