Several of us went out to Silicon Valley this past week to meet with leading technology companies. One of our visit was to Zynga, which is probably the fastest growing company in the technology industry right now. They shared a piece of data with us that was staggering.
Every day, they capture 1 Petabyte of data from their customers. They use this for analysis and for developing new products and features. (It takes them adding over 1,000 servers a week to handle this data).
Our next stop that day was Chevron. Chevron, a Fortune 5 company with over 65,000 employees and 100 years of history, in total has 10 Petabytes of data stored.
Zynga literally creates the history of Chevron in terms of data every two weeks! It is amazing to see the difference in how a modern company operates compared with a more established one and the culture changes that are taking place in how data is approached.
The people and companies that best learn how to leverage this data in the coming years will really start the new trend for future growth. There is a ton of data out there (think also Google, Facebook, etc.), and we are just starting to understand how to use the huge mountains of data that we are capturing.
This also challenges managers to think about data in different ways. Not just the quantity but also the quality of data that drive insights and fast action. Beyond storage to driving fast adaptation and refinements to the offering. Brave New World, Nate.
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