The online world today creates more data every two days than has been produced since the dawn of man till the 2000s. Staggering isn’t it? By 2020 there will be more than 600 zettabytes of data created annually by IoT applications.
An evolving term, Big Data quantifies this unstructured, semi-structured and structured data; a goldmine for information. This is where Big Data solution providers come in handy. They assist businesses in implementing Big Data solutions by providing valuable insights that expand their opportunities.
Gartner defines Big Data as high-volume, high-variety data, arriving at high velocity and demanding an innovative yet cost-effective information processing method to mine insights from it. Big Data solution providers provide solutions to these three Vs of data, a task too hefty for traditional data processing technology.
Big Data solution providers answers to the 3Vs of data
Since Big Data comes in high volumes, these providers’ systems process and store data beyond the capabilities of standard computing power. They use high-tech algorithms and cluster management to help break this task into manageable smaller pieces.
It is estimated that there are over 7 billion IoT devices in use today. These high-velocity multiple data sources require real-time processing for near-instant feedback. Big Data solution providers have moved the industry away from batch-oriented data processing to real-time streaming through their robust processing technologies.
IoT devices regularly feed the online world with all types and formats of raw state media, ranging from video, image, audio, text, and structured logs that require processing for business insights. Big Data solutions provide processed and consolidated single system high variety data to businesses.
Advantages of Big Data solutions to businesses
- Product development
These solution providers can help companies to anticipate a rise in demand for products to ensure that they are poised for more profits when a wave hits. Macy’s, for example, takes advantage of real-time pricing tools from the SAS Institute to adjust product prices in real time for its over 73 million products. Business can use Big Data solutions to help test markets, launch new products or early rollouts plans through insights gained from analytics.
- Predictive maintenance
This Big Data solution can ensure that businesses foresee major business problems before they happen and that all forces are deployed to maintain their uptime. Big Data solutions will keep a business’s error messages, log entries machine and equipment at a company’s fingertips to make them available when they are most needed.
- Personalized customer experience
Morton’s The Steakhouse recently made waves when it served dinner to a longtime customer who tweeted his wish for his dinner at an airport. Through Big Data solutions, Morton’s was able to access its customer’s orders and know his flight’s timing, turning this opportunity into a viral publicity stunt, perfect for brand recognition and loyalty. Big Data solutions provide data about web visits, social media metrics to call logs to ensure that a business can deliver top-notch personalized customer experiences.
- Decreasing expenses
Big Data solutions can help businesses save money in a variety of ways, ranging from a more cost-effective approach to storing and processing huge amounts of data to actively identifying more efficient ways of doing business. For example, they allow a business to save on many non-core activities: for example, an organization can forgo creating a huge portion of its data infrastructure, delegating this task to a cloud-based Big Data solution.
- Saving time
Extremely high speeds of Big Data tools like Hadoop allow an organization to achieve results that would either be impossible in any other way or would have taken too long to be of any use. New sources of data can be identified and analyzed in real time, leading to valuable insights and decisions that use the latest available information. Without Big Data solutions, it is either impossible to glean the right decision from the available disorganized information or it takes too long, and the decision is applied too late when potential competitive advantage is already lost.
- A better understanding of existing market conditions and trends
Proper analysis of Big Data can give you information about market conditions that is unavailable in any other way. The simplest example is the analysis of customers’ purchasing behaviors across multiple stores. By finding out which products are bought more often and at what times, a company can tweak the supply to meet the requirements of the public better and follow trends as they alter over time. This gives one tremendous advantage, especially over competitors that don’t use the same strategy.
- Controlling online reputation
Social listening has been a thing for a long time already, but it is usually associated with the manual analysis of what people say about your company on the Internet and reacting to their words. Big Data allows a business to take it to a completely new level, automating the whole process and giving you real-time updates on the customers’ sentiments and reactions.
- Focusing on local preferences
It is important both for small businesses looking for the best ways to impress and satisfy their highly localized markets and big companies trying to find an optimal strategy for every store location. Using Big Data allows you to understand the likes and dislikes of local customers better. When you know and understand their preferences and are capable of combining this knowledge with a little bit of personalization, it gives you a significant advantage over the competition.
- Hiring better employees
Big Data can help you not just do better business but hire better people as well, allowing you, for example, to analyze huge numbers of LinkedIn profiles in search of candidates with optimal combinations of qualities, skills, and abilities.
Big Data solutions: The benefits are unlimited
From increased productivity, costs reduction, fraud detection to enhanced decision making Big Data solutions have become the go-to source for increased revenue brought about by actionable insights from data.
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