My time working in business management taught me many things but perhaps the most surprising was that I am a data geek. How is that even possible for someone who got a “D” in high school trigonometry? It’s because data is about more than just math, it’s about collected information that reveals trends, problems and valuable information on consumer behavior and these days, we have more of that information than ever.
Sys-Con Media recently covered an ABI Research forecast showing that data collected and stored on mobile traffic alone will reach 200 Exabytes by 2019. By way of refresher the scale goes gigabyte < terabyte < petabyte < exabtye < zettabyte, and one exabyte is one billion gigabytes. That’s a lot of call logs.
In reality that breaks down to everything from purchasing behavior to calling behavior, app usage and socioeconomic brackets; anything a company can learn about its consumers that can be sold or leveraged to give it a competitive edge. Disney (News - Alert) is even looking at the theme park experience to both improve customer satisfaction and, let’s be honest, increase profits. The McKinsey Global Institute studied the value of big data in both the corporate world and on the national level. Their findings include:
Retailers using big data completely could increase operating margins by more than 60 percent;
U.S. healthcare could use big data to drive efficiency and quality, effectively increasing revenue by $300 billion each year. Two-thirds could come from reducing U.S. healthcare expenditure by about eight percent;
In developed Europe, government administrators could save more than $149 billion in operational efficiency by using big data, not including savings from the reduction of fraud and errors;
Users of services enabled by personal-location data could capture $600 billion in consumer surplus.
And the advantages don’t stop at consumer behavior. Just this year BMW has started using IBM’s (News - Alert) big data analytics to predict design and production problems before cars ever get into mainstream use. Information captured during test drives is quickly crunched, so that a process that used to take months to produce action items into forms capable of being analyzed, has been whittled down to days.
But the bigger and more valuable the dataset gets, the harder it is to manage, and that’s where ABI Research (News - Alert) sees real growth potential. For firms able to help companies once they’ve reached their data saturation point – and that point varies – the returns could be enormous. Since it’s a growth industry the earning potential for data analysis firms in only limited by what the market will bear.
One ABI analyst notes that the telecom industry is catching on to the value of what they have, with vendors like Ericsson (News - Alert), Nokia and Huawei creating data analysis solutions to manage their own information, and that can trickle down to mobile network operators. Though telecoms will have to remain flexible with their offerings if they intend to capitalize on it, every company’s data analysis needs start with the ability to capture and retain data, and end with customizable and flexible output.
Right now, however, the results of the data we have are pretty clear: for any smart programmer, data geek or behavioral analyst looking to get in on the ground floor of new growth, look to mobile traffic.
Edited by Rory J. Thompson