Business managers collect data about their customers for quite some time – over the past decades there were numerous technologies to learn more about the customer behavior and used it to improve the product or service they offer. Typical examples of techniques used to gather such data are customer loyalty cards and referral schemes.
What changed?
Nowadays, you hear most of the leading entrepreneurs and business managers talking about how the use of Big Data helped them increase sales, improve customer experience and allowed them to better understand what their clients actually need.
So what’s so special about Big Data? Business managers rely on statistics and analysis for decades to make the right decision and reach wider audiences, but with the internet taking over, the sheer volume of data got so large that it was needed to develop entirely new approach and tools to actually use it.
With so many items that are able to transmit data (from smartphones to industrial sensors), the volume of data available to business owners online has grown enormous and keeps on growing at rapid rates even as you read this article.
Where companies store Big Data?
The IT industry is growing constantly over the past few decades, which resulted in large increase in the storage available for users. At the beginning computers had just few kilobytes of storage space, while modern smartphones are packed with 32 GB and most of the modern computers are equipped with 1 TB (1000 GB) usable storage.
Today, we are seeing a completely new evolution in Big Data storage with the help of the growing popularity of the cloud. This IT innovation enables business owners not only to receive cost-effective solution to store all data they gathered, but also to develop tools to filter and interpret it. You can see a video of Oracle’s CEO Mark Hurd on how businesses could benefit from the cloud.
Why Big Data matters for business owners?
Data alone means nothing without proper interpretation and although processing power has evolved much, processing still requires large amount of resources. Fortunately, the cloud is here to save the day once again – it offers companies unlimited processing and storage resources at reasonable cost and no maintenance expenses.
Studies among companies show that those that use insights from Big Data managed to gain significant edge over their competitors. Furthermore, business managers are able to improve the efficiency of their production cycle and also reduce marketing costs, while reaching better targeted audience. There are numerous other benefits of Big Data for business owners – check out this great video by Oracle’s CEO Mark Hurd explaining how data insights revolutionize businesses.
How to handle Big Data?
With the growing amounts of data gathered by companies, Big Data analytics and interpreting require entirely new skillset. There are entirely new job positions available that require in-depth understanding on how to analyze, interpret and protect important business data. The demand for such positions is constantly growing, but there seems to be shortage in qualified personnel.
Over the past decade, more and more companies realized that they are losing key positions to their competitors due to lack or incomplete Big Data analysis. If you still haven’t implemented it in your company, you might be losing lots of customers and resources!