Want Net-New Revenue? Get Your Big Data Analytics to Go Real Time

Data volumes have been growing for decades, and that’s not slowing down any time soon. According to an IDG survey, it’s expected to increase 76 percent within the next 12-18 months. From the C-suite, big data first looked like just the same ol’ data, only more of it. And while growth in data volumes has its challenges, solving data management issues isn’t something to make CEOs hearts race–they’re happy to let IT take care of it.

But now, with the ability to effectively analyze big data, it’s no longer a data center storage problem. Instead, big data has become a big business opportunity. And when you take it to the next level and add the ability to analyze big data in real time, it becomes a game changer for organizations—a chance to improve efficiency, get a deeper perspective on customer needs, and even bring in net-new revenue.

Now that CEOs have realized the potential of big data, more companies are investing in big data technologies. A 2013 Gartner survey showed 64 percent of organizations investing or planning to invest in big data technology compared with 58 percent in 2012.

In designing a big data infrastructure to gain net-new revenue, organizations are developing or buying software applications, additional sever hardware, and in-memory databases. In comparison to DBMSs that rely on disk storage, in-memory databases are faster, enabling data access without seek time.

Companies are also investing in analytics capabilities, because combining analytics with big data—especially real-time big data—has the potential to transform business practices and bring in new revenue. According to the 2014 IDG Enterprise Big Data research report, organizations are hiring staff with analytics skills and deploying analytics software in preparation for Big Data initiatives.

Who’s Leveraging Big Data Now—and How

Currently, businesses are using big data primarily to enhance customer experience and improve process efficiency. In a 2013 Gartner survey, 55 percent of organizations that had adopted big data reported that they are currently using it to enhance customer experience, while 49 percent are using it to gain process efficiency.

Build competitive advantage and get net-new revenue

By using big data to enhance customer experience, organizations are aiming to optimize customer engagement and build higher revenues and greater loyalty. Big data and analytics combine to increase top-line revenues through real-time recommendation engines, in-game matching, and ad targeting.

For example, a retailer can use real-time analytics to discover that men buying board shorts are more likely to buy T-shirts at the same time, and set up the website to immediately prompt those shoppers to look at T-shirts as well. It can also draw on external data such as weather conditions at that customer’s location to recommend appropriate clothing. Retailers have found that because real-time recommendation engines respond immediately to users’ actions, they can dramatically increase conversion rates, length of visit, and total order value for each visit, pulling in new revenues that would otherwise have been left on the table.

Online gaming companies like Zynga also leverage big data to increase customer engagement. Real-time game matching helps massive social games analyze player’s behavior and then match people with others who play at their level, enhancing the quality of users’ experience and bringing them back to play more.

Ad targeting, too, becomes more effective when it’s based on vast amounts of historical data and up-to-the-millisecond individual browsing history. A company seeking to target a specific demographic can leverage all types of data—such as on locations, search history, and seasonal or social trends—to trigger its ad buys.

Being able to analyze big data in real-time makes a huge difference: One digital ad tech company, CPXi, uses an in-memory database to ingest billions of streaming data points in real-time from different ad partners and slashed its time to perform analysis from 24 hours to just seconds. Now it can provide its clients exact real-time ad bidding, which helps them maximize return on spend and gives CPXi a competitive advantage.

Maximize operational efficiency to save money and enhance revenues

In addition to helping drive net-new revenue, real-time analysis of big data can also produce new savings and additional sales from real-time fraud detection, network monitoring, and demand optimization.

For example, a credit card company can get real-time analysis of transactions, detecting suspicious patterns on the fly and refusing authorization the moment the card is swiped. This could cut a company’s losses due to fraud.

For a telecom organization, real-time network monitoring is mission-critical. Any dropped calls, downtime, or interference with streaming video or data speeds can cause customer defections. Real-time analysis of big data can do more than notice problems: it can prevent them through predictive analytics on both historical and real-time data. Plus, it can help identify upsell opportunities by comparing customer use patterns and demographics. For example, Comcast uses its Big Data in-memory database to aggregate statistics across its entire database while simultaneously executing complex analysis, so the company can resolve any immediate service problems while taking advantage of future opportunities.

Real-time big data analytics is key to demand optimization, too. Processing and analyzing a wealth of historical and right-now data helps companies identify the sweet spot of price and product, and ensures that they have enough inventory in the right places at the right times to optimize sales. For example, a retailer can use real-time analytics on huge volumes of data coming in from its website and stores to see that sales of orange clothing are trending down, and respond with immediate discounting to ensure it’s not left with unsold inventory.

What big data can do for you

Your organization’s data may be its most unique asset. and big data analytics is the key to unlocking its value. With the right infrastructure, you can leverage it and outperform the competition by thrilling customers and inspiring loyalty and increased spending, as well as by improving operations to save money and boost performance. Plus, leveraging Big Data can help add top-line revenue that will help ensure your shareholders, too, are delighted with the success of the business.

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About the author:  Eric Frenkiel is the CEO of MemSQL, a provider of scale-out, distributed NewSQL databases. Prior to co-founding MemSQL in 2011, Frenkiel was an engineer at Facebook.