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Be a part of the Paradigm Shift in Data Analytics

09-Aug-2018 01:30 PM

Posted by Prashanth G J, CEO, Technobind

If there is one topic that the CIOs never get bored of, its the data analytics! This technology has been at the top of the CIO list for many years now. In the latest Gartner survey, CIOs were asked to name the top differentiating technologies for 2018. Business intelligence and analytics still continue to be their number one priority, with top performers most likely to consider them strategic, says the research agency. But other than being a usual suspect of the technology discussions, what exactly is changing in the analytics space? Let me borrow another fact from the same Gartner study. The agency states that analytics can help the CIO and the IT organization to connect to far-flung parts of the organization where they can cultivate new relationships. And, this wind of change is exactly what redefines the analytics space now.

The analytics market today is not just about complex tools that can be accessed only by a set of privileged data scientists. New solutions and tools available in the market today enable even the business users to access and analyse data to drive insights. This is a paradigm shift that literally 'unlocks' the potential of data, while giving IT just the right control to keep data secure.

Why Self-service Analytics

Organizations do understand that data is the new oil and they have been investing on tools that help them accelerate data-driven decisions. But the fact is, the new data-related demands are posing greater challenges to the IT departments. They already have their hands full with issues such as security, access, storage and connectivity of growing data. As business demands quick access and the power to understand that data, the traditional BI tools simply create more work for IT and business sort of wind up in a no-win situation in many organizations.

Modern BI tools offer an alternative, as they are intuitive and easy to use, and bring in powerful, deep analytical capabilities to the end users. This is exactly why many smart CIOs have come forward by enabling a governed approach to self-service analytics. It helps them maximize the impact of data and became a strategic partner to the business by letting go of the control, which never actually served any purpose in the first place. Most importantly, CIOs find it a lot easier to get the budgets allocated for these initiatives, because the business (and hence the board) can quickly see the RoI in investing such tools.

What's in for the Partners

Gartner predicts that by 2019, the analytics output of business users with self-service capabilities will surpass that of professional data scientists. This means that self-service tools will be a significant part of the $2.03 billion analytics market in India in the next one year. There is more use of modern BI tools that grew at almost 50 percent within the last year itself while the traditional BI tools only grew single digit. This is opening up a huge opportunity for many tier-2 solution providers who were considered to have no technical/sales capabilities to take analytics to the market.

In the next 12-18 months, organizations of all sizes in India will actively encourage an analytically-savvy workforce and start investing on tools that facilitate this democratization of analytics. The overall analytics market is expected to see a remarkable growth with close to 24 percent CAGR! Solution partners are often skeptical about the prospects of selling analytics solutions, merely because it called for additional huge investments, the right specialists (who are very hard to come by) and the sheer effort in presenting a compelling conversation to customers. With data visualization and self-service BI tools, the tables are turning. Many of our partners have leveraged their unique analytics offerings to improve their share of wallet with the existing customers and even get into competitive accounts with minimal effort.

In the nearest future, new technologies like machine learning and natural language processing are going to elevate the possibilities of analytics even further, making it the ultimate thing to go after.