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In an interview at BeyeNETWORK, Dan Lahl, senior director of product marketing at Sybase (News - Alert), pointed out the need for companies to develop comprehensive platform strategies for handling business analytics and big data. Lahl noted that different users at company operations needed different types of data. For example, the needs of a data scientist are vastly different than the needs of an executive, and those are vastly different than the needs of a second line manager in retail who has to make a decision in the next 15 or 20 minutes about a product strategy at a store.

In order to properly leverage their data, companies need a solution that acts as comprehensive platform for data aggregation and analysis.

“What we're talking about at SAP (News - Alert) Sybase is a comprehensive platform strategy for actually taking all of the data, structured and unstructured together, that exists in the enterprise, across all the silos that have different data latencies and different user requirements, taking into consideration all the different users’ needs from building predictive analytics, to operational dashboards, to recurring reports, to ad hoc analysis, and getting all of that in one comprehensive platform so you can service all the users with all the data across the enterprise,” Lahl said.

Lahl cited the example of a Sybase customer in the United Kingdom. The company uses a call center solution that operates around the clock. The call center has 3,000 staff all of whom need access to customer data during calls.  

“But then they also have data scientists that are looking to give the call center people better options to offer to customers who call in. Well, the data scientists have their own compute resources that access the same customer data tables, and they actually can run their own analytic algorithms without impacting the call center, which needs sub-second response time,” Lahl said, noting that Sybase IQ 15.4 delivers that service through a feature called virtual data marts. “You can set up different application areas within the 15.4 environment and optimize for different workloads, different applications, and different people needs. And that's all in one analytics data platform with Sybase IQ 15.4.”Storing and accessing data is not all that companies need to do. With so much information stored away, only by analyzing it can companies derive the full benefit. Lahl said that advanced analytics like data mining, data discovery, and predictive analytics are growing in popularity as businesses move to exploit data as a resource.

“We really see that as one of the big moves within the analytics space. We still see that people need to do these bread-and-butter reporting applications, and they need to have some ad hoc query capabilities so they can ask these Google (News - Alert) kinds of questions,” he said. “We also see the need for the application-to-application stuff on the low data latency side. But we see a big move in the marketplace toward advanced analytics, data mining, data discovery and predictive analytics. We see the number of data scientists within enterprises growing dramatically. The data scientists are the ones who troll over huge amounts of data looking for trends and anomalies – for that needle in the haystack – so that, for example, they can recommend to the company that they take one product, map it up with another product and the customers will buy those two things together for more money.”