Market Sizing – Business Analytics and Big Data

“Google, Facebook are really big data companies, not software companies. They collect data, process it and sell it back with value added extensions. They don’t have better algorithms. They simply have more data.”   —  Anonymous

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The convergence of cloud, social, mobile and connected computing has sparked a data revolution. More than 90 percent of the world’s data has been generated over the last two years . And with a projected 50 billion connected “things” by 2020 , the volume of data available is expected to grow exponentially. This proliferation of data has created a vast ocean of potential insights for companies, allowing them to know their customers in a whole new way.

Data is valuable. Data is plentiful. Data is complex. Data is in flux. Data is fast moving. Capturing and managing data (Cloud, On-Premise, Hybrid IT) is challenging. It’s a paradox of the information age. The glut of information that bombards us daily too frequently obscures true insight.

Help people uncover, see, understand and visualize data presents a broad and momentous market opportunity….call this user-driven discovery. Take for instance, Facebook (like Amazon.com) builds a custom Web page every time you visit. It pores over all the actions your friends have taken—their postings, photos, likes, the songs they listen to, the products they like—and determines in milliseconds which items you might wish to see, and in what order. Is this the future for every firm…..

The opportunity is simply getting bigger by the day. Every customer interaction is generating a growing trail of data (“data exhaust”). Every machine that services the customer is generating data. Every conversation, transaction, engagement, touchpoint location, offer, response  is a potential digital bread-crumb of opportunity.

Now let’s flip the context.   A typical mobile user check their phone interface 150 times a day for updates.  A Gen Y  or Millenial user obviously much more than a Gen X user.  The consumption patterns for information are changing continuously.  Facebook style real-time updates which were revolutionary 5 years ago seem outdated in the mobile world. We live in an “attention deficit economy” where attention is the new basis for competition. The firms that create the evolving experience using data which can grab/hold your attention will attract marketing and ad $$.

As a result, the buzz and hype around data…small data, big data, machine data, social data, mobile data, wearables data….is relentless. As a result there are a lot of new initiatives and companies.  I have been asked repeatedly by a lot of entrepreneurs and strategy teams about analytics market size and opportunity size.  Product and services firms are also interested in opportunity sizing as they create new offerings in the data rich world.

I thought i would share a mashup of industry and market sizing data i have collected so far.

• How big is the overall market for Analytics, Big Data?
• How big is the market for Digital Customer Interaction or Engagement?
• How big is the market for Mobile and Social Intelligence?
• How big is the market for Wearables?
• What is growing fast, faster and fastest?

All good questions as services firms think about digital strategy, analytics and future state.  You always want to be in the “hot” area… selling is easier, valuations are richer, revenue growth percentages exponential.

Omni-channel Conversion Optimization with Social Marketing/Media Analytics

Brooks Brothers is investing in tools & testing to improve the online experience – and ↑sales. In a test involving one product category page: men’s shirts. The retailer using Bazaarvoice Ratings & Reviews software, used customer reviews to sort items on the product page. Items with five ♥♥♥♥♥- the highest rating – appeared on the top of the page. The result:  a 9% lift in conversions   [Adobe Digital Marketing Symposium]

Are you ready to anticipate and influence your audience in a whole new way? Value migration from traditional marketing to 24×7 digital marketing is happening in leading firms.  Real-time marketing and conversion is now becoming possible.

IoT, Machine Data and Cloud Analytics: Splunk

Machine data (Internet of Things) or “data exhaust” analysis is one of the fastest growing segments of “big data”–generated by websites, applications, servers, networks, mobile devices and other sources. The goal is to aggregate, parse and visualize this  data – log files, scripts, messages, alerts, changes,  IT configurations, tickets, user profiles etc – to spot trends and act.

Machine data comes in many forms. Take for instance, what the Bosch Group is doing in Germany and Schnieder Electric in France.

The Bosch Group has embarked on a series of initiatives across business units that make use of data and analytics to provide so-called intelligent customer offerings. These include intelligent fleet management, intelligent vehicle-charging infrastructures, intelligent energy management, intelligent security video analysis, and many more. To identify and develop these innovative services, Bosch created a Software Innovations group that focuses heavily on big data, analytics, and the “Internet of Things.”

Similarly, the Schneider Electric focuses primarily on energy management, including energy optimization, smart-grid management, and building automation. Its Advanced Distribution Management System, for example, handles energy distribution in utility companies. ADMS monitors and controls network devices, manages service outages, and dispatches crews. It gives utilities the ability to integrate millions of data points on network performance and lets engineers use analytics to monitor the network.

By monitoring and analyzing data from customer clickstreams, transactions, log files to network activity and call records–and more, there is new breed of startups that are racing to convert “invisible” machine data into useful performance insights.  The label for this type of analytics – operational or application performance intelligence.

In this posting we cover a low profile big data company, Splunk. Splunk has >3500 customers already.  Splunk’s potential comes from its presence in the growing cloud-analytics space. With companies gathering incredible amounts of data, they need help making sense of it and using it to optimize their business efficiency, and Splunk’s services give users the opportunity to get more from the information they gather.

The Curious Case of Salesforce and Workday: Data Integration in the Cloud

The growing enterprise adoption of Salesforce SFA/CRM, Workday HR, Netsuite ERP, Oracle on Demand, Force.com for apps and Amazon Web Services for e-commerce will result in more fragmented enterprise data scattered across the cloud.

Automating the moving, monitoring, securing and synchronization of data is no longer a “nice-to-have” but “must-have” capability.

Data quality and integration issues — aggregating data from the myriad sources and services within an organization — are CIOs and IT Architects top concern about SaaS and the main reason they hesitate to adopt it (Data security is another  concern). They have seen this hosted data silo and data jungle problem too many times in the past. They know how this movie is likely to unfold.

Developing strategic (data governance), tactical (consistent data integration requirements) or operational (vendor selection) strategies to deal with this emerging “internal-to-cloud” data quality problem is a growing priority in my humble opinion. Otherwise most enterprises are going to get less than optimal value from various SaaS solutions. Things are likely to get out of control pretty quickly.