As companies seek competitive advantage with analytics, there is a sea change occurring in their data. More organizations are gathering diverse data, including structured, semistructured, and unstructured data. In fact, TDWI research indicates that collecting “new” data types, such as text data and machine data, is already moving into mainstream adoption. This data comes from multiple sources both internal and external to the company. Much of it is produced in the cloud. For example, enterprises are collecting social media data from a variety of channels, subscribing to external data services and data marketplaces, and collecting data from IoT devices.

Many organizations already collect terabytes or even petabytes of data. They want to analyze this data using more advanced analytics such as machine learning or natural language processing (NLP).

The cloud data platform ingests, merges, and stores this diverse data from multiple sources. It can also provide services for data management, including metadata services or services for data quality.