The Internet debuted way back in 1984, when it connected more than 1000 hosts at university and corporate labs. It took the World Wide Web almost 15 years to grow to 50 million users. In 2009, there were more than a billion users around the world, and now, seven years later, we have almost 3.5 billion users according to Internet Live Stats. Every day, all of those people create more than 2.5 quintillion bytes of data according to IBM – so much that almost 90% of the data in history has been created in the last two years alone. And all of those volumes of data have to be put in use somehow.
Gartner predicts that by 2017, most business analysts will have access to self-service tools to prepare data for analytics. The preparation of data remains one of the most time-consuming challenges facing users of data discovery tools and business intelligence analytics, but new data preparation capabilities are emerging every day, and soon, they will be able to provide business analysis the ability to access, profile, prepare and integrate data for analysis and consumption by BI SaaS platforms.
Even though most companies go out of their way to gather as much data as they can, most critical data doesn’t even get used. In fact, research by the Forester Wave revealed that between 60 and 73 percent of data goes unused for business intelligence analytics. With an increasing number of smart devices, collecting large amounts of data is not a problem anymore. However, it is not easy to get that data in a suitable format that companies can work with, and data means nothing if the right technology is not applied to it. So the big question here is – why not leverage all those BI analytics available and use it to improve your company?
Salesforce has established the Wave platform, devoted to analytics; Apttus has also brought such functionality to businesses with Dynamic CPQ and Panorama has developed Necto, a BI software tool that delivers key business insights and help companies achieve their key organizational objectives. As tools such as these continue to develop, companies around the world will be able to use all of their data to understand any bottlenecks that are occurring within their business process and drive better results based on this information. These analytics will also help businesses leverage consumer data, and enable them to ensure that each customer always gets the right product, at the right price.
Â
