Data has become immensely important to enterprises. According to Praveen Narra, entrepreneur and CEO at Indyzen Inc, the only way to please your customers is to understand them, and the only way to understand them is to analyse every bit of data about them that comes your way. In this age when every aspect of a product needs to be designed and customized for their target audience, how you get, use and organize data is of paramount importance. This is undoubtedly the era of “big data”. Here is everything you need to know about big data and how to use it for your enterprise.
When I use the word big data, I refer to the manipulation and handling of such a huge and diverse amount of information that special tools and methods need to be implemented to handle it. It encompasses all issues relating to the speed of retrieval, variety and volume of this data.
Dealing with big data can primarily be thought of under two complementary categories, Operational and Analytical. Operational data handling deals with the operational capabilities like retrieval, storage and reading of data while the Analytical branch deals with analyzing this complex and variant data using algorithms to read through some or all of the data.
Once you have decided to go through with big data analytics for your enterprise, you have some pretty tough decisions ahead of you. You will first have to zero in on what you want your data analysis system to achieve. It is crucial to decide its functionality, whether you want it to solve one problem or an array of them and so on. Once you have outlined the backbone of your data system, here are some other issues you should give some thought to.
You will have to decide whether you want an Online model or an Offline one, what kind of software licencing model you would like, Propriety, Open Source or Cloud Service, how you can get involved with a community and online forums to help you through your big data journey and so on.
Big data means understanding your customers like never before. It opens up a number of business opportunities for you and builds customer loyalty like nothing else. It is about time you implement your own big data analytics system in your enterprise.
