Membership

SIPA hosted an eclectic panel of speakers from Big Data advisors to key decision makers in companies to share the trends on Big Data Analytics.

Event Moderator: Piyanka Jain - CEO, Aryng

Panelists:
Naren Patil - SVP Marketing, NGData
Peter MacKenzie - Head of West Coast, Think Big Analytics
Nader Fathi - EIR at Plug n Play, Formerly CEO/Founder of SIgmaquest
Sameer Chopra - VP, Advanced Analytics at Orbitz Worldwide

The panel was posed some tough questions –Is Big Data hype or real? Have companies been able to monetize the value of big data? What are the deterrents preventing companies from adopting Big Data technologies? And finally how can the audience benefit from this new trend in their careers?

On Big Data Hype

• A common sentiment shared by the panelists was that Big Data was overhyped, but not all hype. Big Data technologies are now enabling the companies’ access to data which was earlier not storable or analyzable – from time sensitive location specific data to analyzing terabytes of logs, text etc; however the key to deriving the value lay in successfully defining the business problem.
• Naren, from NgData, shared a few examples of how Big Data analytics was now giving companies a 360 degree view of the customers and helped increase the redemption rate of coupons by 200% for a bank. Samir, from Orbitz shared how Orbitz was now analyzing data across a variety of sources such as voice calls, customer feedback and transactional data to deliver higher customer satisfaction. Micro-targeting by Obama campaign was also enabled by the new techniques and technologies of Big Data analytics.
• Traditional BI tools aim to find specific and deep answers from a small subset of data, whereas the Big Data technologies has enabled us to get a more broader view by allowing analysis of petabytes of data.
• Big Data is a technology evolution and is here to stay.

On Adoption Challenges

• Companies, Peter shared, are daunted by the investment and talent needed for successfully implementing a big data project. The need is to start small with a single use case to quickly demonstrate the value and then build on it. Using experts along with internal resources will enable company to side step some of the challenges of implementing a new technology.
• There is disconnect between the IT and the business teams with the business lacking awareness of the data they have and the IT teams underestimating the impact. More collaboration is required between all the stakeholders to make the adoption successful.
• Organizations think that they don’t have the right tools. In reality, Priyanka believes, what is missing is the information architecture. By starting with the business problem and defining the criteria for success upfront, the companies will have greater success in harnessing the value of their data.

On Opportunities

• Big data technology shift has created new opportunities for people and companies alike. Data Scientists are highly sought, combing the skills of programming, statistics and business acumen. Sameer shared resources like Coursera, Udacity etc for learning about these new technologies.
• Naren pointed out that the infrastructure space is getting crowded, with open source technologies expected to drive higher adoption. There is considerable potential in the upstream market of analytics and visualization. With the scare analytics talent, there is a huge need for being able to deliver insights from data.
• By focusing on specific verticals and solving business problems, the companies will have a higher degree of success.

 Overall, the key takeaways were that Big Data is here to stay, and so is the need for data scientists. To get value out of this evolution, start with the business problem and then apply the new technologies to it.

To further enhance your knowledge of Analytics and Big Data, our partners are providing training and webinars .

• 1. Aryng is offering a week long training program on Business Analytics targeted towards Product teams, marketing, sales and engineers. More information can be found at http://www.aryng.com/landing/DTD-Week-Analytics-Workshop-for-Product-Marketing-Apr-15-19.html

Think Big Analytics is providing free webinars every week. The two coming up next week are:

• 1. Where (now eBay) case study on the use of Big Analytics to attract, retain and grow customer base
• 2. Introduction to H Base

Please register here
Event Photos Click here

Part1

Part2

Q&A