Big data technology solutions for businesses are some of the most exciting tools that companies have ever had to optimize their understanding of their customers. While many businesses still use traditional market research efforts to collect data on their customers, there are a treasure trove of new ways to analyze the information they retrieve.
Amazon and Microsoft are just two of the innovators competing for the attention of global sales and marketing teams ready for the extra customer intelligence gathering capabilities that cloud-based enterprise products offer.
If you’re wondering why businesses should be so excited about these latest new products when there is a useful array of applications that facilitate customer data collection on the market already, continue reading.
Pricing
Big data was once only the domain of companies with huge enough budgets to take on the massive undertaking of gathering and analyzing tons of quantitative and qualitative information on their customer’s buying behavior. Only the largest companies in the world could make the investment required to have the hardware, software and talent on-site to get effective data mining processes off the ground. Affordable apps abound now, however, allowing companies of any size to skillfully manage consumption data.
While a range of players are entering this exciting and lucrative market, Amazon and Microsoft are leading the pack. Microsoft Azure’s Stream Analytic Service’s features, for example, can be purchased “a la carte.” In other words, users only pay for what they cherry-pick from Azure’s broad spectrum of capabilities. Customers who use Amazon Web Service’s big data analytics tools are also able to pick and choose what they want to deploy, so they also significantly reduce their data mining expenses.
Ease of Use
Nobody ever said that sorting algorithms was simple. To the average small business who doesn’t use such elaborate measures to increase sales, it’s never been a friendly sounding word. Emerging businesses, however, are highly interested in the improved ability to predict customer behavior that data mining solutions provide now that they’re simpler to use.
A growing number of modest sized enterprises, light years from ever making it onto Forbes’s list of largest companies, are taking advantage of the new generation of data mining solutions. The advanced data analysis solutions now available to them can be purchased with basics such as cloud storage and disaster recovery. Amazon Web Services runs neck to neck with Microsoft in terms of it also having a wide scope of products and functionality.
Thanks to cloud based data mining solutions, businesses of every size can develop more profitable and meaningful relationships with their customers. While capturing data relevant to a business’s bottom line may once have been simplest in areas such as retail, where point of sale (POS) software systems have been in place for decades, data analysis in other industries was basically once a privilege only available to companies with huge budgets.
Drawing meaningful conclusions about the information that these tools allow businesses to collect, however, remains a challenge. Many companies admit they don’t know what to do with the increasing amounts of data they now have the ability to collect, especially in regards to storing it.
The good news is that it’s a great time to discover who among your customers is most likely to be a repeat buyer and forecast how much they’ll spend because the tools are out there.
