Twitter, Facebook, Amazon, Verizon, Macy's, and Whole Foods are all companies that run their business using data analytics and base many of the decisions on the analytics. Think about what kind of data they are collecting, how much data they might be collecting, and then how they might be using the data.
Let's look at the grocery store example seen earlier; what if the store starts expanding its business to set up hundreds of stores? Naturally, the sales transactions will have to be collected and stored at a scale hundreds of times more than the single store. But then, no business works independently any more. There is a lot of information out there, starting from local news, tweets, Yelp reviews, customer complaints, survey activities, competition from other stores, the changing demographics or economy of the local area, and so on. All such...