Big data has been a popular topic in technology media for years, and smaller businesses have assumed that the concept was for businesses with massive amounts of customer, transaction or scientific data. Now the ability to analyze mass amounts of data can be applied to smaller businesses, since the large volume of data being collected across the Internet has begun to accumulate into structured volumes of valuable information. The ability to glean interesting and useful insights by crunching this data has become a reality.
When Excel or the analytical tools built into the core systems your business uses are no longer enough, because data and reports are spread across multiple systems using multiple data sources (spreadsheets, databases, files) on many servers, it’s time for tools that help bring together and crunch this disparate set of data. This is the focus of big data solutions. Businesses are able to answer broad, multifaceted questions such as:
- “Which of my products are least price-sensitive and in what geographic areas?”
- “How best can I increase repeat sales to customers of service X”
- “What testing patterns are we seeing with experiment Y?”
- “How are the sales of Product Z segmented?”
These are the kinds of analytical questions that require many sources of data to come together for the answers. To achieve this, solutions must have two fundamental capabilities. First is the ability to process both structured and unstructured data quickly. Second is the ability to visualize results into actionable outputs. In a subsequent post, we’ll look more closely at both of these and some solutions leading the way.
For more information on integrating big data solutions into your business, contact Superior Technology Solutions at (845) 735-3555 or visit www.superiortechnology.com.
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