In an era of “big data,” or consumer and transactional data collected that can be measured in terabytes, many companies are finding themselves in a quandary: how to process and analyze that data?

A 2012 news report told us that social media giant Facebook (News - Alert) collects in excess of 500 terabytes of data each day thanks to the all the information input by users. Facebook can afford to process that data and turn it into intelligence. But for many other companies, it’s an agonizing matter of which data they can retain, analyze and use. Chances are good that they are passing up some valuable intelligence.

While a supercomputer would solve the problem, supercomputers are simply far out of budget range for most companies – maybe not anymore. Supercomputer maker Cray said yesterday that it is introducing a new “aggressively priced” line of supercomputers that should put them into the budget reach of a wider variety of companies. The new Cray XC30-AC supercomputer uses many of the same components and software elements as those monsters, but it is air cooled, requires no optical cables and costs from $500,000 to $3 million, according to InformationWeek.

While that may seem like a hefty price tag (News - Alert), consider that Cray’s other supercomputers have generally retailed for around $20 million, which meant they were within reach of only the government, research centers, universities and the largest of companies. A price of as low as half a million dollars could open the supercomputing option to even moderate-sized companies, many of which are in dire need of that kind of processing power.

“We're seeing a new wave of demand because companies are gathering more data and asking more complex questions than ever before," said Barry Bolding, Cray's VP of storage and data management and corporate marketing, in an interview with InformationWeek.

While the newest price tags may be opening up the supercomputer market to Fortune 1,000 companies and smaller foreign governments, imagine what a computer like that could do for the customer support industry. Call centers gather more information on a daily basis than almost any other industry (perhaps just after social networks), and having the ability to use all that information, slicing and dicing it into detailed reports that can be used to improve the customer experience and develop new products and services could be invaluable.

It also wouldn’t hurt a company’s cache to have a Cray computer in the IT room.