Analysis has been with us since the dawn of human consciousness. When early man tried to understand why an animal drops when you hit it with a rock, he made the first analysis.
Analysis means nothing more than breaking down an action or event into its individual parts in order to understand it better.
Today's world is to a great extent run by computers. With it, analysis morphed into a complex and sophisticated discipline that looks at data and data streams to discover inherent patterns. This is called analytics. It uses science and computer technology to find, track and gather data to analyze and interpret. Analytical probing can become the basis for predictive analytics.
If you own a website, a blog, an email or social media account you see ads. They are ubiquitous and often annoying. Ever wondered why you suddenly are bombarded with ads for automobiles as soon tell a friend on Facebook that you are looking for a new car?
You just have met custom analytics applications. Google analytics to be specific. We also refer to it often by the generic term 'data mining.'
However, Google is only one of the most visible incarnations of a specific type of analytics. There are many more categories of custom analytics. Together they spawned an entire interdisciplinary industry that delivers this type of comprehensive analytics. Forio is a company that specializes in developing custom analytics applications for their customers.
The simple answer would be, companies that do big business with other businesses or with consumers. These types of companies routinely have a big data flow as a total and in individual departments of the business. Among them are, retail sales, inventory control, sales by product or service, results of marketing decisions, the performance of the sales force, price optimization, financing and credit, loss prevention, lists of best-selling items and predictions of trends for future sales. Of course, many other companies and business or administrative entities can and do benefit from a custom analytics application.
Custom analytics also has a place in government, non-profit organizations and even in science. There it takes the form of predictive analytics. Scientists often use existing data to build scenarios that allow them to predict situations that will exist in still unexplored events and areas.
A custom analytics application is a very intricate and advanced pieces of software. They frequently involve the expertise of specialists from many fields of business, science and government. The quality of the work of a company that develops analytics software depends on the quality of its team of experts. More is not always better. But a custom analytics application requires the cooperation of more outstanding experts than most other software developers.
Customized analytics applications involve almost invariably extensive computerized data processing. Members of custom analytics must, therefore, be familiar and comfortable with the most current techniques used in computer science and statistics. And let us not forget mathematics.
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