The big data era: Challenges and opportunities in the perception of the software industry experts

Software industry organizations are known by being intensive in producing different types of knowledge during all the software development process. That's because this industry builds different types of software-based solutions, as well as storing a large amount of data for their customers and their projects. This amount of data is stored in databases so that it can be used in different tasks in the organization in the future. Thus, many of these databases are characterized as Big Data. In this sense, this article aims to investigate the challenges and opportunities of using Big Data within organizations of the software industry under the perception of specialists. For this, it is exploratory research based on interviews with experienced professionals of the software industry. Our results show that Big Data benefits decision making by providing more accurate data analysis, using tools, and requiring trained professionals to create and update knowledge with the support of Knowledge Management. On the other hand, the results point to the hardware challenge for Big Data processing and analysis.