In five short years the world of analytics has changed immeasurably. Five years ago Hadoop was reaching the peak of the hype cycle and it acted as a wake-up call to businesses that perhaps there is value in their data.
This evolved more recently into big data analytics. Although Hadoop opened a door to big data, it wasn’t actually the right tool for what most businesses needed – fast analytics, interactive experimentation with data and exploratory analysis of data.
Now we have the right tools and Hadoop has evolved into something else: a fantastic data siloing tool with the added bonus of being able to run jobs on the entire dataset at scale. The right tools have added to this, and brought speed and agility to the party.
Adoption on the rise
Why is adoption on the rise? Because businesses can see a measurable value from running advanced analytics on their data. ROIs are clear to see, by extracting value from data, businesses can improve the customer experience or reduce costs and this can benefit a businesses’ bottom line. With the latest analytic databases they can do this faster and cheaper than ever before.
With fast analytics, it’s easier to keep up in an ever-changing world and keep pace with customers and market forces. The world is speeding up thanks to advances in technology and markets shifting at a greater speed than before.
For businesses to survive and thrive, agility and scalability are essential. Integrating advanced analytics into the business strategy improves the speed of innovation and time to market. It places the customer at the heart of the business and improves the customer experience.
Changing the marketplace in retail
Retail is one sector where advanced analytics is growing fast.
Retail faces a world shaped by advanced analytics as it pushes the boundaries on delivering a first-class customer experience, so businesses must meet customers’ expectations or risk losing them to a competitor.
Zalando, the largest online fashion retailer in Europe by sales, is just one of many companies to benefit from using advanced analytics. The e-tailer offers customers the opportunity to purchase more than 150,000 products from roughly 1,500 brands, in 15 European countries. Using fast analytics, it is now able to respond to its customers’ behaviour more quickly and accurately than before, as well as manage its stock quantities with better precision. Adopting advanced analytics has helped Zalando to improve the data handling process and reduce the query response times, which means it can focus its resources in other departments to improve the business as a whole and deliver the best customer experience possible.
Analytics will become pervasive
Advanced analytics can elevate a company to the next level and provide it with a competitive edge over its rivals through the real-time insights it can achieve. In-memory analytic databases are making it possible for the smallest start-ups to compete on the same level as the big enterprises. It is levelling the playing field and providing competition in a marketplace that was once dominated by those with big budgets.
Advanced analytics will eventually become pervasive. The key to how quickly it is adopted is down to company culture, and whether the right people are in place to help the business integrate advanced analytics into the business strategy. It is down to C-level executives and senior IT managers to help instigate this change and promote the benefits to their colleagues. Businesses who act now and implement advanced analytics will reap the benefits of a data-driven business.
