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November 7, 2013

New Data Standard May Save Billions

Isaac Lopez

The international World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is finalizing a new data standard that could lead to $3 billion of savings each year for the global web industry. The new standard, called the Customer Experience Digital Data Acquisition standard, aims to simplify and standardize data for such endeavors as marketing, analytics, and personalization across websites worldwide.

“At the moment, every technology ingests and outputs information about website visitors in a dizzying array of different formats,” said contributing company Qubit in a statement. “Every time a site owner wants to deploy a new customer experience technology such as web analytics, remarketing or web apps, overstretched development teams have to build a bespoke set of data interfaces to make it work, meaning site owners can’t focus on what’s important.”

The new standard aims to remove complexity by unifying the language that is used by marketing, analytics, and other such tools that are being used as part of the emerging big data landscape. According to the initial figures from customer experience management platform company (and advocate of the standard), Qubit, the savings from the increased efficiency could reach the equivalent of 0.1% of the global internet economy.

Of those benefitting the most from the standard, the United States comes in a clear winner, with savings that reach into the billions, with average savings per business in the tens of thousands of dollars.

Per the Qubit statement:

“The standard will have the most impact in territories with higher labor costs. In the US market – the biggest Internet economy in the world – the savings would total just over $1.4 billion, whilst in the UK savings would reach $263 million (£169 million). China has almost 1.5x more ecommerce businesses than the UK, but it only saves $99 million. These figures represent significant savings for individual companies, with the average web business in the US saving $32k a year; in the UK $23k; and in China $6k.”

The new standard could go a long way towards decreasing the time to value on big data projects. “The benefits of adopting the data layer will be significant,” stated Qubit. “Time that is currently spent doing manual labor and the laborious editing of scraps of JavaScript will be able to be spent in other ways. Instead of spending a great deal of time creating custom solutions, site owners have the opportunity to set their developers working on optimizing their conversion rates by improving the experience of their customers.”

In order to help companies prepare for the new data standard, contributor company Qubit has launched the W3C Digital Data Toolkit site, which gives advice on how companies can bring their own sites up to compliance with the new standard.

“The W3C’s new standard has been developed by a consortium of technology vendors and website owners in order to streamline the inefficient way in which customer experience data is currently managed,” said Graham Cooke, CEO of Qubit in a statement. “By creating a single, unified standard for this data, the industry as a whole can generate significant efficiency savings when it comes to developing and deploying new technologies. Implementation of the standard is a one-time effort and, once it’s in place, the savings can be significant.”

Related items:

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Facebook’s Super Hive-Killing Query Machine Now Yours 

OLTP Clearly in Hadoop’s Future, Cutting Says 

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