Today's technology is rapidly changing our lives and influencing how we interact with brands, as well with each other. The digitization of everything, particularly the widespread use of mobile and sensor data, has significantly increased user expectations. This rapid adoption of newer technologies - mobile, digital goods, video, audio, IoT and an app-driven culture - has resulted in new ways to engage customers with improved products and services. At the heart of this transformation is how organizations use Big Data to drive competitive advantage.
When we look across the various industries, we see a common theme. Data is transforming businesses and helping drive board level initiatives. Apache Hadoop is, in many ways, enabling this shift. With maturity of the platform and technology ecosystem, the conversation has shifted from technology and cost savings, to driving business value with data.
Board level initiatives across industries fall under three key areas:
Drive Customer InsightsLet's take a deeper look at each of them.
Collecting data about everything your customers do - from the moment they come to your website to the moment they purchase you product and continuing on to the moment they eventually stop using it. There is tremendous insight that can be gleaned if you have a way to capture, store, and analyze all data that comes in many forms from many sources - sometimes at incredible speed. And by the way, this can be applied to far more than end-user customers; the same concept applies to supply chains, vendors, partners, suspected terrorists, etc,...
The second initiative we see is companies who want to use data to improve their existing products (connected cars for example), or use data to develop entirely new products or services (like selling your customers comparative data on their own use of your products, or selling completely new services based on combining live, historic, and public data in novel ways). A new wave of devices are being introduced in the market, and IoT is driving a fundamental shift that is impacting these organizations.
With the explosion of touch points, organizations across the globe are challenged with protecting their business from internal and external risks. One of the most powerfull byproducts that comes from analyzing huge amounts of data is the ability to spot trends and anomalies that were invisible before. By looking at huge populations and vast numbers events over very long periods of time, things come into focus in a way that wasn't possible when you were only looking at a few hours, or a few days, worth of data. That new capability can be directly applied to problems like defending your network against cyber attacks, understanding the behavior of your customers more deeply, detecting insider training, improving the efficiency of supply chains, allocating financial risk in new and more sophisticated ways, or meeting internal and external compliance requirements.
To achieve these board-level initiatives, organizations will need to modernize data architecture. By taking advantage of the same technical concepts that formed the foundation of Google's IT infrastructure, you can implement solutions in your company right now that radically reduce the cost to store, process, and analyze virtually any amount of data - and you can do it affordably. What's more, you can use the same powerful analytic tools you rely on today to derive much deeper insights, far more quickly than before.
We are here to help. The first step is to arrange for an initial meeting with your team to understand what you're trying to accomplish, and identify business-impacting use cases. After that, most of our customers prefer to do some form of proof-of-concept to get a sense of the power of our solutions.