Gartner projects that by 2015, more than 30 percent of analytics projects will deliver insights based on structured and unstructured data.  Sounds rational/logical/realistic to me.  Sounds like the entire reason everyone in the federal space has been moving towards open source Apache Hadoop/CDH based solutions (including new interest in Impala) as a key part of their infrastructure.  And sounds like the reason end users are already clamoring for solutions like Savanna from Thetus. People want insights and they want it from all their data, not just an either or of structured or unstructured.

Here is more from the Gartner 24 January 2013 release on the topic:

By 2015, more than 30 percent of analytics projects will deliver insights based on structured and unstructured data.

Business analytics have largely been focused on tools, technologies and approaches for accessing, managing, storing, modeling and optimizing for analysis of structured data. This is changing as organizations strive to gain insights from new and diverse data sources. The potential business value of harnessing and acting upon insights from these new and previously untapped sources of data, coupled with the significant market hype around big data, has fueled new product development to deal with a data variety across existing information management stack vendors and has spurred the entry of a flood of new approaches for relating, correlating, managing, storing and finding insights in varied data.

“Organizations are exploring and combining insights from their vast internal repositories of content — such as text and emails and (increasingly) video and audio — in addition to externally generated content such as the exploding volume of social media, video feeds, and others, into existing and new analytic processes and use cases,” said Rita Sallam, research vice president at Gartner. “Correlating, analyzing, presenting and embedding insights from structured and unstructured information together enables organizations to better personalize the customer experience and exploit new opportunities for growth, efficiencies, differentiation, innovation and even new business models.”

Gartner provides more detailed analysis in their report titled ”Predicts 2013: Business Intelligence and Analytics Need to Scale Up to Support Explosive Growth in Data Sources.” The report is available on Gartner’s website at http://www.gartner.com/resId=2269516.

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