Specific Tools Will Get Best Analytics Results

Analytics is an extremely fast growing field of technology, as well as a business tool for enterprises that like to keep ahead of the pack. But it’s best advantages can be derived only with the right tools and creating specific solutions to resolve business problems, says  Ajith Nayar, Marketing Director, Manthan. It is only then that its full potential will be realised in terms of a tool that drives business.

Analytics is the most happening business tool today. Your opinion on its on-ground utility?

Analytics offer tremendous possibilities for an organization to compete better, innovate products and services, increase revenues and profits, improve customer understanding and engagement today. All of this, from a better understanding of not only data and insights, but also the business contexts in which analytics is expected to create a solution, change or impact.

There are many technologies available, but analytics continues to remains a challenge for many organizations because of their inability to use analytics in the right business context, implement decisions that produce the best outcomes and acquire the capabilities to consistently use analytics as a vehicle for business improvement. For some, analytics usage is still limited to a few techno-savvy analysts and not easy enough to use for the everyday decision maker.

What’s required is creating analytic applications that are designed to solve specific business problems, simplifying user design like any other Smartphone app, and going beyond throwing up metrics, reports and dashboards to implementing specific business decisions and completing the analysis to execution lifecycle.

What is the single biggest challenge that enterprises face in churning Big data, today? Technologies abound, but is there any downside?

Breaking conventional thinking is perhaps the biggest challenge to realising benefits from big data. Many organizations are pursuing big data projects without much ROI. Big data opens up new possibilities because processing new data sources are now within our reach, but at the same time, their use cases and business implications are not yet validated.

Having a clearly defined application area with targeted business benefits and process improvements is a better way to approach big data project. For example, it makes sense to invest in a customer analytics project using big data technologies for running algorithms at scale, granular customer understanding, or even personalized offer/content recommendations. Traditional technologies may not be suitable in terms of speed to value, performance or cost effectiveness.

Why has Manthan limited itself to retail and customer organisations? Why not bigger adopters of technology like BFSI or healthcare?

Manthan differentiates in the analytics provider market with its deep industry specialization. All of our products/solutions are tailored for specific business processes and decision makers. Therefore, Manthan does not promote a one-size-fits-all philosophy for its products engineering. Our customers testify Manthan is really good at what it does.

Commensurate with Manthan’s specialization, size, growth and market opportunities, we have forayed into the retail and consumer oriented market segments with much success. While these industries continue to be high growth markets for Manthan, recently we have also started exploring other verticals in the area of customer analytics. As an organization, we don’t see a limitation in our market strategy wrt to the choice of our industry solutions, and they have always been a logical progression of seeking the best opportunities the market offers at any time.

Manthan also services eCommerce analytics for retails. How do you ensure security for this data and the process of analysis?

Manthan employs a 5-layered security approach for its solutions on cloud/online platforms and this is the industry’s highest standards for security. The comprehensive approach covers all aspects of Data, Application, Network, Facilities and Processes. A short overview of our security approach can be viewed here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5m5H0oZ8GlY

How do you see the Indian market growing with analytics? Is the adoption being leveraged or it is a fad, with very few really understanding its implications and power?

We’ve seen various levels of analytics maturity in the Indian market. Some of our clients in India are at par with the best in the world in terms of their analytics strategy, skills/competence, benefit realization, scale of implementation, and organizational maturity. At the same time, we’ve also seen many organizations at lower maturity with huge opportunities to leverage analytics better.

We feel analytics buyers in the Indian market are more aware of the benefits of analytics, as well as the available tools and technologies in this market today. Organizations are focusing on not just acquiring technologies but also putting them to good use, to change the way they do business. And in doing so, companies and teams go through their learning curve, improving their insights, testing new ideas, refining business processes and so on.

Are your HR analytics, and eComm analytics solutions also customised for retail industry only?

As of today, Manthan targets the Retail (Brick & Mortar and Omni-channel), Consumer Goods (FMCG), Online/E-Commerce, Travel and Hospitality industries. We also do a smaller volume of business in the Telecom, Hi-Tech, Pharma, Market Research and other Business Services sectors.

Does Manthan provide end to end utilisation support for the actionable insights it provides? As in, not only data, but also converting it into actions?

While pioneering effort on making analytics actionable has gone into our product and platform engineering and design, Manthan also offers many of our clients consulting business services that are focused on maximising the leverage of analytics for improving business outcomes.

What trends do you see for your niche industry over the next year? Where will India stand, and how will analytics be doing?

The analytics market is one of the fastest growing markets in the software technology sector, and remains a #1 CIO priority for the last couple years. The trend of digitalization of businesses is pushing analytics beyond its traditional boundaries to many new areas of applications. Here, the boundaries between people, software, machines, devices are gradually blurring, and analytics as a pervading computing intelligence is becoming the bedrock for technologies of the future.

I think India as a provider and as a consumer of analytics will see exciting times ahead. The consumerization of analytics will open many new possibilities for expanding India’s market share and potential.