Over the last couple weeks since the 2016 Hadoop Summit in San Jose, eSage Group has been discussing the future of big data and enterprise analytics. Quick note – Data is data and data is produced by everything, thus big data is really no longer an important term.
eSage Group is specifically focused on the tidal wave of sales and marketing data that is being collected across all channels, to name a few:
- Websites – Cross multiple sites, Clicks, Pathing, Unstructured web logs, Blogs
- SEO – Search Engine, Keywords, Placement, URL Structure, Website Optimization
- Digital Advertising – Format, Placement, Size, Network
- Social
- Facebook – Multiple pages, Format (Video, Picture, GIF), Likes (now with emojis), Comments, Shares, Events, Promoted, Platform (mobile, tablet, PC) and now Facebook Live
- Instagram – Picture vs Video, Follows, Likes, Comments, Reposts (via 3rd Party apps), LiketoKnow.it, Hashtags, Platform
- Twitter – Likes, RT, Quoted RT, Promoted, Hashtags, Platform
- SnapChat – Follows, Unique views, Story completions, Screenshots. SnapChat to say the least is still the wild west as to what brands can do to engage and ultimately drive behavior.
Then we have Off-Line (Print, TV, Events, etc). Partners. 3rd Party Data. Don’t get me started on International Data.
Tired yet?
While sales and marketing organizations see the value of analytics, they are hindered by what is accessible from the agencies they work with and by the difficulty of accessing internal siloed data stored across functions within the marketing organization – this includes central corporate marketing, divisional/product groups, field marketing, product planning, market research and operations.
Marketers are hindered by access to the data and the simple issue of not knowing what data is being collected. Wherever the data lies, it is often controlled by a few select people that service the marketers and don’t necessary know the value of the data they have collected. Self-service and exploration is not possible yet.
Layer on top this the fact that agile marketing campaigns require real-time data (at least close real time) and accurate attribution/predictive analytics.
So, you can see there are a lot of challenges that face a marketing team, let alone the deployment of an enterprise analytics platform that can service the whole organization.
Now that I have outlined the business challenges, let’s look at what technologies were mentioned at the 2016 Hadoop Summit that are being developed to solve some of these issues.
- Cloud, cloud, cloud– lots of data can be sent up, then actively used or sent to cold storage on or off prem. All the big guys have the “best” cloud platform
- Security – divisional and function roles, organization position, workflow
- Self-Service tools – ease of data exploration, visualization, costs
- Machine Learning and other predictive tools
- Spark
- Better technical tools to work with Hadoop, other analytics tools and data stores
- And much more!
Next post, we will focus on the technical challenges and tools that the eSage Group team is excited about.
Cheers! Tina