Big Golf, Big Data

How did it get to be Monday so quickly?

Well, it’s here now, and I guess we just have to deal with it.

A quick congrats to David Toms for winning the Crowne Plaza Colonial PGA tourney in Ft. Worth, Texas, over Rapture weekend.  The end of the world may not have appeared, but boy did Toms’ putter show up.

For diehard golf fans, the Colonial is a special golf tournament, celebrating the life and career of one of the greatest golfers ever, Ben Hogan, who was born in nearby Stephenville and who won the Colonial five times (the last time in 1959).  Hogan died in Ft. Worth back in 1997.

Toms, who lost The Players Championship in a playoff last week, came back this week in Ft. Worth swinging (literally!) to beat Charlie Wi and a diverse field to get his name etched on the Colonial Wall of Champions.

I, for one, am glad Toms came back to win, as I was not really eager to see the world end suddenly, particularly during the weekend of such a classic golf tournament.

But the world can end in different ways, particularly with all that voluminous data floating around out there that’s so difficult to keep track of.

On Friday, IBM unveiled some new software and services to help clients with their “big data” needs.

Why this now?  Consider the fact that 83 percent of 3,000 CIOs surveyed in IBM’s 2011 Global CIO Study said that applying analytics and business intelligence to their IT operations is the most important element of their strategic growth plans over the next three to five years.

Specifically, IBM announced new, patented software capabilities to analyze massive volumes of streaming data with sub-millisecond response times and Hadoop-based analytics software to offer scalable storage to handle tens-of-petabytes level data.

IBM also announced 20 new services offerings, featuring patented analytical tools for business and IT pros to infuse predictive analytics throughout their IT operations.

You can read more about this announcement here.

And go here to get the bigger view on bigger data.

I don’t know how much more effective these new tools will be in predicting the next ending of the world, but I’m pretty confident they can help companies make more sense out of all those endless information streams overwhelming them.