Taking Business to the skies BI holds its ground

Our increasingly connected environment, social media, and various other technologies effectively bring the customer closer and closer to the level of God, no more merely king.  There is no gap warranted between the service and product, and the customer, everything and anything that is sold is up for scrutiny and reprieve.  Most enterprises have taken this challenge as an opportunity to collect  sharper and more relevant inputs, creating an extremely sensitive and virtually priceless database of consumer interactions, reactions, feedback and hence preferences.  This data, with a little intelligence, is a virtual (pun intended) gold mine that can be sorted into piles of nuggets of information.

DATA is King in Enterprise Today

Effective analysis of this data, and the Business intelligence derived from it, is the best strategy for enterprises of all sizes and verticals.  These nuggets can, and do, now drive business strategies, planning, even product design, functionalities, and the way it reaches the market.

As Srikanth Karnakota, Director – Server and Cloud Business, Microsoft India, puts it, “Organizations of all sizes find themselves awash with data; an organization’s ecosystem creates, stores and manages terabytes of data.  Enterprises know they can derive a better deep understanding of the market as well as about their own business from this tidal wave of data.  A recent Nasscom report ‘Institutionalization of Analytics in India: Big Opportunity, Big Outcome,’ says the analytics market in India will double to touch $2.3 billion by 2018 from about $1 billion last fiscal.”

Agrees  Tarun Kaura, Director – Technology Sales, India, Symantec, , “Big Data today, is slowly becoming all-pervasive and is addressing the daily challenge virtually every enterprise faces when managing exploding data growth within shrinking backup windows, growing compliance requirements, and working hard to transform their data centres.  It is an emerging and evolving technology that helps decipher insights from the volume of data being generated.  For some it signifies the challenge of managing enormous volume, velocity, variety, and variability of the enterprise data and for others, it points at the possibility of deploying analytics to catalyze business insights and gain competitive advantage.”

The only challenge in this data is its size.  Storing it in physical servers is obviously one. In order that this humongous data be effectively analysed, sorted, and made conducive to intelligence extraction,   it needs to be worked upon by Big Data and analytics technologies.  As Tarun adds, “To leverage the insights of the enormous pool of data, it is important for an organization to not just store the data efficiently, but manage and categorize the same too.”

The best way to do this is by getting it on the cloud.  Here is where the interest level on the cloud increases.  It is, after all, only when a technology application becomes so business worthy that it can have any value in the enterprise.  The cloud’s value today, is only as a business enabler, not any more as a wow-factor technology that works wonders.  Moreover, specially when that enablement is to do with marketing strategy support, even base, its value increases manifold.

Adds Shrikanth, “Businesses are increasingly looking for analytics tools that can help them connect the dots to the customer and unlock latent strengths within the organization, so they can engage customers better with improved offerings.  Indeed the use of big data in the Indian elections has been a revelation for the political establishment, business and industry, as well as citizens.  Businesses of every hue are betting big on analytics.”

The value of the cloud as a BI platform is not lost on enterprise.  According to Gartner’s research on cloud adoption over years, 30 % of respondents have shown keen interest in using the cloud for business intelligence, over the past 3 years.  In 2014, however, the number has gone up to 45%, almost half of the respondents.  So no more doubts about its efficacy and acceptability as a BI platform.

One of the biggest advantages of adopting cloud technology for any business is about the cost it helps save.  Consequently, its biggest fan club is in the SMB and SME space.  There are many reasons for it, apart from the most obvious one.  Most small organisations do not like to spend money on maintaining an IT department required to manage on- premise storage etc.  The cloud takes away that pressure and the cost for these mandatory activities.  Even larger companies are taking up cloud-based services, one department at a time.  Eventually it is all about cost savings, and who doesn’t need it?

One of the most important departments that the IT today needs to handle is the data analysis, since all marketing strategies finally rest on that.  So adopting the cloud for BI and analytics seems to be the smartest move for smaller companies.  The benefits are clear- lower cost of analysis, faster time to market and simplicity as well as multiple usage convenience.

Adds Shrikanth, “To take full advantage of their store of enterprise data, organizations must make it easy for all users to access the right data, at the right time, so they can make more informed decisions.  They must also ensure the IT process has the tools it needs to manage data access, quality and compliance.  Office 365 invests IT with the repertoire it needs to ensure the right access to data as well as restrict (lock down) access to data by unauthorized users.  This is true for both corporate private data and public data.”