IJCSNS International Journal of Computer Science and Network Security, VOL.17 No.3, March 2017 38 Manuscript received March 5, 2017 Manuscript revised March 20, 2017 The big data Ecosystem and its Environs Babak Bashari Rad and Pouya Ataei Asia Pacific University of Technology and Innovation Technology Park Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia Summary By the virtue of advanced devices, sensors, and social networks, big data arose to confront practitioners with a complete shift in the way they operationalize data. This has changed the context for many industries, and challenged leaders to adopt to big data ecosystem. This paper aims to explore big data ecosystem with attention to its architecture, key role players, and involving factors. In this study, firstly, the paradigm shift is discussed, and secondly the new ecosystem has been elaborated. This ecosystem is then dissected with attention to key role players, big data computation architecture, and skills required. Key words: big data, big data ecosystem, big data role players, big data traits and qualities. 1. Introduction In recent times, through a shift from good-dominance to a service-oriented engineering, “Big Data” has emerged to challenge the industry. This concept has invited an extensive competition to practitioners looking for competitive advantage, escalated productivity, and added- on opportunity. Scholarly researches predicted that the big data is the “game-changing innovation” [1] is the “dawn of new industrial revolution” [2], is the “new category of economic asset” [3], and the “fourth paradigm of science” [4].With prodigious advancements in data generation by prevalence of smart phones, social networks, sensors, and large-scale service-oriented systems, today, big data is a far- reaching trend of information technology. Big data arose from the analysis through Information Systems (IS), Software Engineering (SE), and Business Analytics (BA) theories and practices [1]. Under the trajectory of big data, business intelligence and analytics transmuted with cutting- edge techniques and technologies so as to keep in line with market demand [5]. As a result, business processes faced major differentiators in organizations from various industries, and became increasingly analytic oriented to wring every last drop of value from these processes [6]. Withal, the hype is often vague, and so does little to address the far-reaching bottle-necks. This led to confusions among managers and executive and left individuals to make their own under informed and highly subjective understanding toward the big data, and what it can do and what it can’t [7]. According to Gartner survey, big data is ascending toward the peak of inflated expectations [8]. With all the hype, however, big data is still in infant stage and requires further research and practices to lead organizations out of the dark. 2. The New Wave An unprecedented magnitude of data, allegedly, the ‘data tsunami’ has come to change the world [9]. In recent years, by virtue of advancements in internet speed, smartphones, and IOT, there has been mass production of data worldwide. A study by IDC’s Digital Universe, states that, the amount of data is doubling every two years and is predicted to reach 40ZB by 2020 [9]. To support this fact, the online microblogging services Twitter, gleans and crunches approximately 12 TB of data per day, whereas Facebook take in more than five hundred million likes per day [10]. On the other hand, Cisco Internet Solutions Group (IBSG) anticipate that there will be 50 billion devices connected to the internet by 2020 [11]. Furthermore, according to CGOC (Compliance, Governance and Oversight Council), data volumes doubles every 18-24 months for majority of organizations and 90% of the data in the world has been created in the last two years [12]. According to the same study, in March 2012, the Obama government declared big data research and advancement initiative, which were utilized to address important problems facing the government. IT giants such as SAG, Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, SAP, HP, and Google, have spent a whopping $15 billion on data management and analytics [13]. A quick view at Google Trends, reveals the fact that big data queries have grown excessively, getting 75% increase from Jan 2012 to June 2016 [14]. Figure 3-1 provides an overview of these query trends. 3. Big Data Ecosystem Organizations, starting to realize the state of context and the content where the interplay between the user and the provider is in well simpatico using big data, have their archaic ideas crushed on what is true understanding toward the end user and the market. As big data begin to rise, state of practice in analytics evolve [15]. Today, the industry sees an advanced and intricate implementations of big data, such as Mechanical Turk that uses crowdsourcing, and Hortonworks that brings value-added tools to the market. As the new ecosystem begins to shape, there are four main role players within this nexus [16]. These four main roles players are as following;