CIOTechOutlook >> Magazine >> November - 2013 issue

Data Data Everywhere, Have You Begun to Link?

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Mumbai based Hexaware Technologies Limited (NSE: HEXAWAREEQ), is an IT services and business process outsourcing service provider company. Founded in 1990, the company has a market cap of Rs 3721 crores.

With the explosion of data from multiple growing channels in a variety of forms, it is imperative that organizations have the BI and Analytics infrastructure and means in place to link such data and derive meaningful insight for their business decisions, by effectively leveraging the multitude of sources and forms of data.

Drivers for BI & Analytics:

BI and Analytics continues to be the top priority for CIOs. The key drivers for Business Intelligence continue to be Business Growth Enablement and Cost Control/Process Optimization. Newer opportunities and markets
demand that broader analysis on data is done and deeper insights are obtained. Growth can be driven by enhancing customer interaction and satisfaction, or by enhancing the planning process or by enhancement of competitive
analysis, all of which are better enabled through enhanced business intelligence and analytics. When it comes to profitability, businesses require better control of costs
– optimization of business processes, better monitoring and control of risks – these are also strongly enabled through rigorous BI and analytical solutions. More and more, BI and analytics are gravitating to the core of an
organization’s business processes – analytics is becoming an integral part of operations.

Trends in BI adoption:

Analytical Apps- There is an increasing trend in availability and adoption of industry and domain-specific out-of-the box analytical solutions. Like mobile apps, many of these
pre-packaged analytical apps can be downloaded and integrated into existing enterprise environments with a small effort. Many vendors are providing more of these apps and making them available on the cloud.

Big Data Analytics- Whether it is business growth or cost control through process and asset optimization, big data platforms and analytics techniques are gaining prominence. Many use cases for BI, which were limited
in the past to only some amount and some forms of data, are now significantly enabled and enhanced, with the emergence of platforms and techniques for big data processing and analytics. Some common use cases we have been encountering in this space are:

• Better customer/competitive insight by integrating social media content with other enterprise content:
Organizations are building centres of excellence, and making use of tools for integrating and analysing unstructured data that leverage the available social media data as an additional source to get direct feedback of a new product launch, customer sentiments about competitor's products.

Regardless of the industry, optimization of business processes are taking advantage of the big data computing platforms and processing capabilities such as Hadoop, NoSQL,MapReduce, data and text mining to deliver faster and/or real-time optimization and analytics.

• Analytics for IT also employ big data analytical platforms and techniques. For example, Predictive analytics and text analytics in an IT helpdesk environment enables better and faster diagnosis and resolution of issues, from support ticket data. Analytics on semi-structured application and web-log data are enabled through big data platforms and systems which deal with such logs and perform realtime analysis and presentation of information.

• Big data has also found numerous other industry-specific use cases such as predictive asset management in manufacturing, enhanced fraud management in financial services, traffic flow optimization and weather forecasting.

Real-time Analytics
Apart from analytical apps, predictive analytics, and big data platforms, we find that business agility requires increasing usage of "real-time" processing - be it in the form of in-memory analytics platforms or in the form of real-time data access or "data virtualization" platforms.

Information Discovery and Visualization
Given the explosion of data; data visualization and data exploration/discovery tools are increasingly becoming a key component of analytics and information delivery platforms.

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