Cookies help us display personalized product recommendations and ensure you have great shopping experience.

By using this site, you agree to the Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.
Accept
SmartData CollectiveSmartData Collective
  • Analytics
    AnalyticsShow More
    sales and data analytics
    How Data Analytics Improves Lead Management and Sales Results
    9 Min Read
    data analytics and truck accident claims
    How Data Analytics Reduces Truck Accidents and Speeds Up Claims
    7 Min Read
    predictive analytics for interior designers
    Interior Designers Boost Profits with Predictive Analytics
    8 Min Read
    image fx (67)
    Improving LinkedIn Ad Strategies with Data Analytics
    9 Min Read
    big data and remote work
    Data Helps Speech-Language Pathologists Deliver Better Results
    6 Min Read
  • Big Data
  • BI
  • Exclusive
  • IT
  • Marketing
  • Software
Search
© 2008-25 SmartData Collective. All Rights Reserved.
Reading: Big Data Conundrum: Show Me the Money!
Share
Notification
Font ResizerAa
SmartData CollectiveSmartData Collective
Font ResizerAa
Search
  • About
  • Help
  • Privacy
Follow US
© 2008-23 SmartData Collective. All Rights Reserved.
SmartData Collective > Analytics > Big Data Conundrum: Show Me the Money!
AnalyticsBig Data

Big Data Conundrum: Show Me the Money!

RomanStanek
RomanStanek
7 Min Read
SHARE

Inventory levels. Sales results. Negative comments on Facebook. Positive comments on Twitter. Shopping on Amazon. Listening to Pandora. Online search habits. No matter what you call it or what the information describes, it’s all data being collected about you.

Thanks to new technologies like Hadoop, once-unquantifiable data (like Facebook conversations and Tweets) can now be quantified. Now, because nearly everything is measurable, everything is measured. The result: companies are spending big dollars to collect, store and measure astronomical amounts of data.

Inventory levels. Sales results. Negative comments on Facebook. Positive comments on Twitter. Shopping on Amazon. Listening to Pandora. Online search habits. No matter what you call it or what the information describes, it’s all data being collected about you.

Thanks to new technologies like Hadoop, once-unquantifiable data (like Facebook conversations and Tweets) can now be quantified. Now, because nearly everything is measurable, everything is measured. The result: companies are spending big dollars to collect, store and measure astronomical amounts of data.

More Read

Image
3 Reasons Hadoop is Heading to the Cloud
The specific benefits of business intelligence in Insurance
4 Amazing Time Saving Analytics Tools For Social Media Marketing
Bottoms Up! Big Data for Busier Bars
Paid, Earned and Owned Are Dead

Show me the data!

There’s a name for this movement: Big Data. Not only is it a name, it has been the “it, it” of 2012, possibly trumping “the cloud.”

IDC defines Big Data as projects collecting 100 terabytes of data (hence the name), comprising two or more data formats. Earlier this year, the research firm predicted the market for Big Data technology and services will reach $16.9 billion by 2015, from $3.2 billion in 2010. That’s an astounding 40 percent annual growth rate.

The interesting thing is that IDC expects most of this spending to focus on infrastructure — the plumbing that enables companies to download, collect and store vast amounts of data.

To me, this is a missed opportunity. Why? We need to focus on unlocking the real business benefits from all this data.

Companies have not yet grasped the business potential of all the data pouring in from hundreds of sources—think apps in the cloud, on-premise partner software and from their own enterprise. In effect, businesses haven’t figured out how to make money from this fire hose of disparate data sources.

My point-of-view is that Big Data’s only real value lies in businesses’ ability to transform data into insight they can act on.

This means enabling sales managers to quickly analyze sales reps’ results, view new contracts lost or signed, and react to how actual performance compares against the plan they set months earlier. Help-desk staff could see how individual customers affect sales and profit, showing them when to go above-and-beyond to retain certain customers while allowing low-flyers to churn. Or helping insurance agents to predict kinds and amounts of damage as hurricanes hurtle toward their region.

Steps to Monetize Big Data

To glean value from Big Data efforts, companies need to embrace the real-time value provided by the cloud. Viewing one’s data in real-time through the lens of cloud computing enables anyone, in any company, to make smart business decisions from the mammoth amounts of data, coming from all over the place.

Therefore, companies looking to monetize Big Data need to take these steps:

Use the cloud: These days businesses can tap into an enormous range of cloud services. They can subscribe to high-performance infrastructure services like Amazon Web Services, rent platforms as a service (comprising hardware, operating systems, storage and network capacity) from salesforce.com, store information in services like Box or automate billings with companies like Zuora. These are just examples.

Companies can also pick and choose from a long list of cloud-based apps to handle business tasks, from customer relationship management and marketing to human resources and financial management. In fact, I would argue that cloud services become the business application suite, eventually displacing behemoth on-premise packages from SAP or Oracle. Emphasis on “eventually,” since few enterprises are ready to jettison their million-dollar investments in Oracle and SAP.

For this reason, I advise companies to:

Start with what’s important: Forget about separate data sources. Data today spews in from hundreds sources, be it sales and customer data from salesforce.com, inventory levels from SAP, logistics information from your suppliers and employee data from Oracle. Companies run into trouble when they start off boiling the ocean, which is why I suggest companies begin with a few sources and then build up from there.

Fortunately, there is a way, thanks to a new generation of application programming interfaces (APIs) that allows more kinds of software, from different software makers, to communicate with each other, regardless of location. As a result, any company, regardless of size, can access the data it needs to make better decisions.

Which is why my next point is:

Make Big Data insight democratic: Five years ago, only executives at very large companies had access to business intelligence tools that culled patterns from data.

The cloud makes everything democratic — not just access to the data itself, but the insight as well, including best practices that don’t require the expertise of a SQL or a MapReduce programmer. The cloud enables anyone, anywhere, to recognize patterns from data and make smart decisions, faster. And that means any business professional, at any company should be able to monetize their Big Data.

When Big Data finally becomes useful to the rest of us, and not just IT wizards, it will take on an even larger role today and into tomorrow.

 

Share This Article
Facebook Pinterest LinkedIn
Share

Follow us on Facebook

Latest News

sales and data analytics
How Data Analytics Improves Lead Management and Sales Results
Analytics Big Data Exclusive
ai in marketing
How AI and Smart Platforms Improve Email Marketing
Artificial Intelligence Exclusive Marketing
AI Document Verification for Legal Firms: Importance & Top Tools
AI Document Verification for Legal Firms: Importance & Top Tools
Artificial Intelligence Exclusive
AI supply chain
AI Tools Are Strengthening Global Supply Chains
Artificial Intelligence Exclusive

Stay Connected

1.2kFollowersLike
33.7kFollowersFollow
222FollowersPin

You Might also Like

Chrome Experiments: Online Data Visualization

2 Min Read

3 Effortless Tactics to Be a Data Science Success in Business

7 Min Read

Rmetrics presentations online

1 Min Read
Image
AnalyticsBig DataBusiness IntelligenceData VisualizationExclusiveModelingSocial Data

How Data Visualization Can Benefit SMBs

9 Min Read

SmartData Collective is one of the largest & trusted community covering technical content about Big Data, BI, Cloud, Analytics, Artificial Intelligence, IoT & more.

data-driven web design
5 Great Tips for Using Data Analytics for Website UX
Big Data
ai chatbot
The Art of Conversation: Enhancing Chatbots with Advanced AI Prompts
Chatbots

Quick Link

  • About
  • Contact
  • Privacy
Follow US
© 2008-25 SmartData Collective. All Rights Reserved.
Go to mobile version
Welcome Back!

Sign in to your account

Username or Email Address
Password

Lost your password?