2012: The Year Analytics Means Business

by Timo Elliott, SmartDataCollective.com

The real trend this year is not the technology. It’s about helping business people make better decisions, and actually change the way companies do business. Analytics has always been about transforming business, but the recent huge changes in analytic technology have created interesting new opportunities for business innovation.

Most organizations are now starting to understand the technical opportunities, but many struggle to apply those new opportunities to their business processes. This blog post attempts to explain what’s going on in the analytics market and give concrete examples of how other companies have implemented the new technologies in “game-changing” ways. ….

The economic environment is fraught with extreme uncertainty. This year, the people who run the world will change, and so will many of the policies of the countries they manage. Financial markets have still not completely stabilized, notably with the future of the Euro still not assured.

Companies have reacted to this uncertainty by slashing costs and accumulating cash, and now need to start investing that cash into future development. Since interest rates are low and the business outlook is still uncertain, many of them are using the money for new technology that can help them prepare for the future.

In particular, companies want better visibility about what’s going on in their market, and increased organizational agility in order to be able to deal with change fast. ……

Companies are investing heavily in analytics:

Analytics is the #1 top technology priority for both CIOs and CFOs, according to Gartner
Nucleus Research recently released a report showing that organizations get $10.66 of value for every $1 invested in analytics
IDC has increased growth forecasts faced with stronger-than-expected figures for recent years
IDC analyst Dan Vesset: “After three decades, the business analytics market is finally reaching the mainstream” and “There are few growth inhibitors in the foreseeable future”
At the recent BI Gartner Summit in London, Gartner’s Dan Sommer announced an early estimate of 10%+ growth in analytics during 2011, outpacing general IT growth.

Analytics technology has been changing fast. On the back end, new technologies have come together to provide what Gartner calls “extreme data performance”. These include in-memory, column data stores, in-database calculations, massively parallel architectures, complex event processing, Big Data / NoSQL / Hadoop, and cloud architectures. …….

Lets take a look at three different types of High Resolution Management opportunity, letting companies: