Why Big Data is the key differentiator for your organization

Big data has revolutionized the way businesses perform and most importantly it has brought a drastic change in the decision-making process. Why not! Big data analytics has the potential to interpret, analyze and predict a consumer’s behavior and purchase decisions. In many instances, the predictability of big data analytics is said to be even better than the individuals know of themselves. Business essentially gets this advantage with big data analytics which makes it one of the most important business variant of the 21st century.

The competitive advantage

The data of the past was mainly sample data that the business had to take advantage of. With big data there has been a dramatic change, as it provides a complete picture from all sides of a situation. First of all, this seems to have the potential to change the overall picture of customer relationships. Not only in marketing and customer relationships, its usage spans all aspects of business and it has proved to bring dramatic changes in all the realms.

No doubt, big data has emerged as the biggest differentiator when it comes to a firm’s competitive advantage. In a survey conducted by BMC, an IT consulting firm, 54 % of the respondents opined that big data analytics bring a competitive differentiation. The marketers today acknowledge that adoption of big data analytics would significantly improve an organization’s ability to understand the behavior of the individual customer, profile them, address the customers’ collective needs and help in influencing their purchasing behaviors. This is the advantage of big data although it also provides a way to manage large amounts of data. The companies have gradually realized that with the right team, tools, and the perspective, big data has the potential to guide them to the future with enormous prospects. Big data is said to open new frontiers and pastures with newer and creative ways to make use of the data that IT makes available.

Applications in business

According to the survey conducted by BMC, marketing, finance, business analysts and the executive leadership are highly instrumental in driving the organizations to embrace the solutions offered by big data. A whopping 76 % of the respondents cited that analytics and business intelligence gains the most of the big data advantage. Among the respondents, 55 % of them said that it helped business strategy and direction and 44 % of the respondents felt exploration of the data and new discovery was how it is used in organizations. It is also instrumental to business establishments in taking strategic decisions like whether to expand into new market segments or whether to extend the product lines.

Advantages in data storage

The companies are increasingly finding it as a cost effective tool for even archiving, data extraction, analytics, and transformation. Government mandates to maintain data for seven years and storing data older than seven years proves to be an expensive option. Moreover, even if the data could have been stored for more than seven years it was a mammoth task to retrieve data as the search options were not that efficient. Big data environments which are well designed give you the option of cheap storage as well as fast batch processing. This makes the retrieval easy and the data archive is highly efficient.

With such revolutionary strides of big data, the usage of it is growing at an unprecedented pace. As big data makes its way to various chores of business, it is bringing a dramatic change in how the business operations are carried on and the decision-making process as well. Not only is it applied in marketing and in improving the deliverables to customers but it is increasingly used to impact the production, administration, service offerings as well as improving interactions at all touchpoints with customers.