 | Issue: | Asia-Pacific III 2015 |
| Article no.: | 1 | |
| Topic: | Big Data as it is. | |
| Author: | Shailendra Soni | |
| Title: | Industry Principal | |
| Organisation: | Frost & Sullivan, Asia Pacific | |
| PDF size: | 348KB |
About author
Shailendra Soni, Industry Principal, ICT – Unified Communications & Collaboration
Asia-Pacific
Shailendra Soni is an Industry Principal with the ICT Practice at Frost & Sullivan, Asia Pacific and has over fourteen years of consulting and research experience in the ICT Industry. His consulting expertise includes advising vendors on market entry and expansion strategy, product/service portfolio, and delivering competitive intelligence to broad members.
His diverse experience spans across industries, developed through years of research experience and regular interaction with global and regional level top executives of leading vendors in the Unified Communications, Collaboration, Contact Centres, Enterprise Mobility Management, BigData and Future of WorkPlace.
He has spoken in various industry events and conferences that includes CommunicAsia, Enterprise Mobility Forum, Bank Tech Asia, Vendor Partner conferences and many more. Besides speaking at conferences, Shailendra has also contributed articles on BigData, Enterprise mobility, unified collaboration, contact centres to various trade publications.
He holds a Master of Business (Marketing Management) and a Bachelor of Instrumentation Engineering.
Article abstract
The commercialization of Big Data and analytic (BDA) technologies affords organizations greater benefits, and presents greater challenges than previous advances in computing, networking, and software. Rather than simply speeding up existing processes, or expanding current capacities, BDA offers the opportunity to better understand markets and processes, and to make more informed decisions about how to manage them successfully.
Full Article
The ICT industry is witnessing trends such as proliferation of devices, internet users and starting of the era of Internet of Things (IoT). These connected devices will generate more and more data from users generated to machine generated. Frost & Sullivan estimates that by 2020, there will be 80 BN connected devices, five billion internet users and there will be 500 devices with unique digital IDs in every square kilometre. This together will generate huge amount of data, this data if analysed properly can result in business transformation insights. In Frost & Sullivan we term this as Big Data and Analytics (BDA), as these two technologies complement each other to produce high impact result for businesses.
The global BDA market is expected to reach US$37.8 billion by 2017, and projected to grow at a CAGR of 28.0 percent from 2013 to 2017. The factors that will be driving this growth included
• Expected increase in awareness level of benefits of BDA and understanding of the technology
• Expected transition from BDA exploration and evaluation to deployment
• BDA initiatives and programmes driven by government such as smart cities, parking management and other many more
• More and more availability of BDA as a service
• Growth of IoT and connected devices
• Increased openness of data in some sectors
• Open initiatives driving rapid innovations and cost effective solutions
BDA Adoption Trend
Although BDA has been there for many years now, the adoption has been low in the Asia Pacific region. However, BDA adoption is increasing at a rapid pace where in bulk of the businesses are expected to be in the exploration stage.
Figure below explains various stages of BDA maturity in a business context
As is evident most of the businesses have limited analytics and hence are far away from having big impact on their business. As they move from stage 1 that is Augment to stage 4, transform, businesses are more likely to add to their top line and be benefited by the impact of big data.
BDA– Perceived and accepted benefits
One thing of BDA is that all the CIOs understand and agree to potential impact of BDA in increasing their business top line, improving productivity, uplifting the customer experience and many more.
However, if BDA is deployed with specific goal, it delivers better result and thus enables IT manager to roll out to other business function. For example, B2C companies are generally interested in increasing the customer CSAT score. This can be achieved by integrating the customer databases across contact centres and functional head. By doing this banks, insurance companies and telecommunications service providers can increase the response time, often gain edge over competitors and are able to achieve higher customer satisfaction score (CSAT). Needless to mention this has positive impact on customer retention, at the same time helps contact centre agents to be more productive, as they can attend to more calls than they did before the implementation of BDA.
Challenges to adoption of Big Data
Although CXOs completely understand the benefits of deploying technologies to gain insight from available data, they have continued to shy away from embracing the technology. There are some common challenges faced by CXO’s, especially ones that are yet to start the journey.
• Lack of in-house skill; is the most frequently sighted challenge
• End-to-end solution
• Trusted partner that will help them in complete deployment of BDA
In addition to this, there have been few inhibiting factors that have slowed down the pace of deployment.
• Silo-ed data
• Unstructured data
• Lack of information sharing between functional heads
• Lack of communications between various functional heads
In addition to these a proper step by step implementation plan is a must to ensure that chosen technology is roll out to all employees at the fastest possible time and specific to their needs. This should be followed by keeping track of usage pattern and conducting training on regular basis to increase the technology usage.
BDA components
It is essential to look at various components that form BDA. A typically BDA solution will start with hardware component encompassing server and storage, connectivity to data sources and to server, software to analyse the data (include finding to data and ability to run analysis to find insight) and related integration services to business processes.
Majority of companies currently have hardware and connective to a large extent. But it is important to consider the scalability of storage space and server compute power. It should be easy to scale up as the generate data will continue to grow at a rapid pace. Most of the companies are already in this phase of beyond this phase.
Connectivity is generally given, considering that today’s world is hyper connected and that is increasing every day. Software procurement is done only by limited number of companies. Often B2C and small companies are more apt to adopting the software part. These companies have managed to disrupt the industry and given rise to new industry.
BDAs adoption by individuals, B2C and B2B companies
Individuals adapt more quickly and easily to new technologies than do organizations. In their work environments, individuals adapt to outmoded business processes and systems by continuing to fulfil their requirements, while also finding ways to circumvent them. Casual, undocumented processes and relationships enable them get their jobs done without breaking the legacy systems that inform upper-level decision-making.
The commercialization of Big Data and analytic (BDA) technologies affords organizations greater benefits, and presents greater challenges than previous advances in computing, networking, and software. Rather than simply speeding up existing processes, or expanding current capacities, BDA offers the opportunity to better understand markets and processes, and to make more informed decisions about how to manage them successfully.
The more complex a company’s product or service, the more complex its value chain, and the more difficult it is to change business systems and processes. B2C companies have less complex value chains than B2B, and are more motivated to adopt BDA solutions than their B2B counterparts. B2C companies know that consumers can switch providers at their next purchase, while commercial customers of B2B products and services face high costs and complex transitions when they switch suppliers. B2C companies can also get more information about consumer preferences than B2B companies can get from participants in their complex value chains; hence, the early adoption of BDA by banking, insurance, health care and packaged goods providers.
BDA and disruption
Established businesses are being exhorted to ‘disrupt themselves’ before the next Airbnb or Uber enters their market from a new and profitable angle. Big Data and analytic (BDA) solutions offer the key to successful disruption and transformation; but BDA is not well-understood, nor have its costs and benefits been well-defined and demonstrated.
Enterprise decision-makers with decades of experience tend to equate BDA with the enterprise software suites of the 1990s. They don’t realize that BDA solutions are far more powerful, flexible and attractively priced than the 90s-era enterprise software suites. Nor are they encouraged by the lack-luster experience of early BDA adopters—only about half of whom have been able to quantify a return on investment from their deployments.
Most early BDA adopters also have struggled with a variety of implementation issues. To some extent, these sketchy benefits and implementation hurdles characterize any early adoption phase. Buyers take hopeful chances on new technologies; and vendors promise more than they can deliver; but both sides are willing to forge ahead to get a leg up on their competitors.
Summary
In today’s Big Data and analytics market, it is easier to try out BDA solutions, thanks to freemium pricing models and cloud-based solutions that are quickly instantiated with a minimum of planning and commitment. These attractions, however, will not be sufficient to bring BDA vendors their next wave of buyers, who will need a more consultative sales approach and more comprehensive implementation support than the early adopters.
Frost & Sullivan believes that B2B, B2C and all other types of enterprises and organizations will be motivated to deploy BDA solutions in the coming years. Organizations that ignore or postpone BDA initiatives will be outpaced by competitors who are more nimble, and who are more willing to suffer the disruptions and meet the challenges that will accompany any successful BDA implementation.
As has been evident big data benefit reach many fold when the insightful data is generated that acts as a seeding idea for new business or for acquiring new clients or for increasing the CSAT score of existing client. For this to happen Big Data has to be deployed horizontally, that is across as many functions/ departments as possible. The key to this is to get the buy in of function heads, get CXO to chair the implementation and monitoring committee and reward function heads that lead the adoption.
The use case of BDA is increasing while this is important to continuous evolve and be ahead of market, it is imperative that the BDA is deployed completely with specific goal/business objective and is monitored on regular basis and realise the full potential of BDA investment.
