BULLETINS

Present scenario in online travel is engineered to work under this constraint: data costs money, so we need to be more efficient as much as possible in handling it. What happens usually in applications is data has been locked away in storage tower. Applications talk to the outside world through controlled keyholes that are only capable of answering specific questions with specific answers. These situations make the applications to take time to get the proper response. Now we have a smart solution to smash these hassles…Big Data!

Big data is more than a challenge; it is an opportunity to find insight in new and emerging types of data, to make your business more agile, and to answer questions that, in the past, were beyond reach. Technically, Big data is a horizontally-scaled, general purpose storage and computing stuff for well-arranged data (B+Trees), designed to operate on a cluster of product hardware. Big data uses dynamically partitioned key-range shards. This architecture was chosen to remove any realistic scaling limits and may be deployed on 10s, 100s, or even thousands of machines.

In Big Data there are no requests, no predefined parameters and no structured responses. You are free to intersect anything with anything. You can analyze, mutate, group, split and reorder in any way you can imagine. There are no limits to what you can ask and how often you can ask it. The only constraints are your imagination and the number of computers you have at your disposal. Big Data is not just a set of technologies that can be used to solve hard problems; it is a new way of looking at the problems themselves. And those who master these technologies gain an unfair competitive advantage.

In the last fifteen years, no travel company – startup, OTA, airline or GDS – has been able to build and launch an airfare search that returns results in under a second. One company, a pioneer of Big Data that we all know well, coming from outside of the industry, has just achieved it in less than six months. Now we have to consider this our wake-up call. We need to learn the craft of Big Data. We need to invest in the technology of massively parallel processing and scalable storage systems.

And Open Source has made these technologies available, they include Hadoop, Disco, Cassandra, HBase, CouchDB, MongoDB and others. These will go forward over time, but what matters is that learning how to use them will forever change the way we build products and companies and this will lead to unpredictable and extraordinary things.

Let us be ready to make it happen, Best of luck!