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Analytics: stretching your customer reach using analytics
Analytics has evolved from providing statistical outputs
for creating trends to predictive analytics, which filters out
information from substantial existing datasets to identify
patterns and predict future outcomes. The next level of analytics
awaited is prescriptive analytics, which will help gain an insight
into the lives of customers, understand their lifestyles, interests
and behaviors, and provide them appropriate products or
services that they need.
According to EY’s “The DNA of the CIO survey”, 60% of CIOs
think they add strong value to their businesses by enabling
analytics to make fact-based decisions. Evolving companies with
an equal focus on sales as well as margins have categorized
data analytics as “somewhat important.” This shows that some
CIOs are still slightly skeptical about unstructured data, which
is driving the back end of operational excellence. The survey
confirms this — with 53% of CIOs from the Retail and Consumer
products industry considering analytics to be very important and
32% of CIOs believe that analytics is somewhat important for
their organization.
52.63%
respondents
categorized analytics
as very important
Cloud – The Highway or the “Cloud Way”
Cloud computing started off as a public cloud where cloud
infrastructure is made available to the general public or a large
industry group and is owned by an organization selling cloud
services. Private cloud soon arrived where cloud infrastructure
is operated solely for an organization. The next step in cloud
computing is a hybrid cloud. A hybrid cloud is a composition
of two or more clouds (private or public) that remain unique
entities but are bound together by standardized or proprietary
technology that enables data and application portability (e.g.,
cloud bursting for load balancing between clouds).
The survey results show an interesting trend indicating
that investment in cloud computing is delivering a range of
benefits, including a shift from capital-intensive to operational
cost models, reduced overall cost, increased agility, reduced
complexity and increased security.
Of the respondents from the Retail and Consumer Products
sector, 63% agreed that they are reaping the benefits of
investments made in cloud-based technologies. Furthermore,
57% of the respondents plan to spend anywhere between 1%
and 25% on new technologies, including cloud and another 41%
plan to spend more than 25% on new technologies.
63.2%
respondents agreed that cloudbased
technologies have given them
significant benefits
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