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Nathan Golia
Nathan Golia
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Teradata's Insurance Leaders on Big Data

John Burke, VP of the financial services practice for Teradata, and his colleague Peter Hughes shared some opinions on big data yesterday at the Insurance & Technology offices.

Yesterday, we met with John Burke, VP for Teradata in charge of the company's insurance practice, and Peter Hughes, the company's director, global industry programs at the Insurance & Technology offices. Among the many topics we discussed was big data. Here's some of their opinions:

On defining it:

Burke: It's not just about data being big. It's about volume, variety and complexity. Sensor data, images, weblogs, — these don't normally loaded into databases for analytical purposes. So our mission statement as a company is we need to be an analytic data solution provider.

On integrating with Hadoop:

Burke: Hadoop is an open source software framework — that's great, but it doesn't really scale to a large number of users. So we've taken the SQL backbone and built bridges so it doesn't matter where the data is on the platform, we can get it.

On leveraging big data to improve the customer experience:

Hughes: The insurance companies are showing interest in big data for a number of uses from telematics to customer management, but I haven't seen a lot of adoption to date. Regarding customer centricity, in the past insurers bought CRM platforms and thought they were done. The biggest problem is change management — getting agents and other employees to buy into a customer focused approach.

Nathan Golia is senior editor of Insurance & Technology. He joined the publication in 2010 as associate editor and covers all aspects of the nexus between insurance and information technology, including mobility, distribution, core systems, customer interaction, and risk ... View Full Bio

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