Tip #1 – Don’t hunt for all the data

Fetching everything and anything you can; followed by unclear objectives brings in more complications. Thus, always start with a set business case. Is it about capturing customer response or improving operational performances? Whether you are developing search algorithms or applications for run time risk management; leaner the inputs, relevant are the outputs. Make it easier for the algorithms to crawl to the targeted data sets.

Tip #2 – Clean the hunted data

Cleaning simply means removing any redundancies or erroneous inputs. More important is to understand that prevention is better than cleaning. Make sure the information captured is correct and falls in at the right data sets. Recheck the relationships, hierarchies and the mapping algorithms.

Tip #3 – Bring on board the Data Analyst

Set right expectations from the beginning. Analysts can predict potential data questions from a targeted business case. Working on selective data objects will help pitch for more relative information querying. This experience can help with accurate predefining and results into more valuable data analytics. Data Analysis (derived out of your Big Data processing) should impact and hint at solutions.

Tip #4 – Conduct performance tuning

Standardization of data objects such as tables, structures, fields, etc. across reports help negate potential instabilities in the code. Lesser debugging effort means faster report development. Also, monitoring the disk drives frequently is needed for steady task execution. Degraded disks can affect overall performance of MapReduce jobs.

Tip #5 – Leave some room for experimenting and innovating

Just like the end user doesn’t actually know what exactly Big Data could deliver, it is the developing stage where innovation could conceive. Let the developers play with the data, try different relationships and challenge the usual approach. Just one cool discovery will change the game for the better. However, the realization has to progress as committed and thus a balance is needed.

Bonus Tip – Let it cost a little more!

Be flexible with costing. Don’t enforce fixed budgets as reporting can get unpredictable. Let more reports be generated without having the need for additional agreements and cost defining approvals. Investment in developing a reliable solution that extracts reports as and when needed by the business could be a great idea.

Aiming for High performing Analytics functions? Big Data is the key!

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Big Data provides opportunities for marketers to add the missing math to their creativity. Marketers can analyze data to attach significant results to their brand building exercises. These valuable insights can help organizations to take informed sales and marketing decisions.

Here are 5 essential ways that organizations can use Big Data to churn out smarter marketing decisions:

1. Tracking the marketing budget

Marketing spend has an uncanny ability to go spirally out of control, and hence adversely impacts the ROI. Using Big Data Analytics, marketing teams can track the effectiveness of their efforts, thus prompting them to focus on targeted customer engagement tactics. Analyzing feedback from social media listening tools and customer behavior analysis can be powerful sources to act in this direction.

2. Enhance customer intelligence

Big Data in the form of unstructured data from social media, videos and blogs, can augment the customer intelligence of a company which is traditionally dependent on transactional data, CRM records and past purchase patterns. With an enhanced intelligence, the organization can create personalized lead management programs.  When a lead visits the company’s website via an AD-link, user experience can be improved for higher conversion rates. This can be achieved through data such as usage maps from a web page that can reveal areas of the page that are most frequently visited.

3. Watch and win the competition

Data on the web is freely available. Does it not make business sense to gather data not just about one’s own company, but also about the competitors? This can enable a business to measure its own success vis-à-vis its competitors, thereby gaining insight from the overall market scenario. This can be translated into better marketing initiatives for future and inoculate competition.

4. Data driven approach to content marketing

It is a smart decision to analyze marketing data to measure the effectiveness of published content such as blog or article. Data driven content marketing strategy can streamline the efforts in creating the appropriate information that will engage your target audience. This can help to convert the readers into customers. Similarly, collating data from the marketing tools and technologies helps to engage in other data driven marketing opportunities to improve business.

5. Reach out to target audience

What is the point of running a campaign if it does not strike a chord with the audience? What if it went to the wrong people at the wrong time? The knowledge of customer demographics, preferences and geographical whereabouts of a potential audience can be extracted from their social media presence and personal device data like location data. Targeting market campaigns to a smaller audience that is more likely to respond brings down marketing costs and increases the ROI.

To stay ahead of competition, business of all sizes – small, medium and large, must quickly incorporate Big Data analytics into their processes. The huge volumes of data can be a deterrent. Here is where Big Data analytic services can be a great help. Companies can engage experts like Baryons to implement Big Data on Hadoop solutions for their complex business needs.

It is not going to be a smooth sail! It never is!

Will getting insights from Big Data give you the Midas touch? No! After all, it is data, no matter how well organized. The intellect and experience of your business leads will still be needed to translate the data into decisions that make sense for your goals.

If there is anything spectacular that marketers have been waiting for, it is Big Data. There is no denying that Big Data is the new kid on the block that is grabbing the eyeballs of all marketers. Will you befriend it?

The post Top 5 reasons to revamp your marketing strategy using Big Data and gain competitive advantage appeared first on Baryons Software Solutions.

It is well-known that unstructured data silos are available in abundance within the systems of an organization. The real challenge lies not in the collation of data, but in making it really useful. Enterprises have been considering the adoption of big data analytics to deliver value and identify meaningful action.

To get the right kind of big data analytical solutions on board, enterprises would need to incorporate the following factors:

1. Business requirements should drive the adoption

Should an enterprise jump into the Hadoop bandwagon simply because it seems to be the way ‘forward’? This could be a disastrous decision. Rather a thorough analysis of the specific business needs should be done to understand whether the adoption will truly address those needs.

2. Start via a small pilot and adopt agile practices

Before going full throttle, it may be a wise idea to identify a small pocket where big data analytics can add big value. Based on the success of the pilot, it can be scaled to other processes within the organization. Shifting to agile methodologies can help to bring in cost and time efficiency as the company prepares to implement Hadoop across multiple functions.

3. Support for hybrid architectures, structured and unstructured data

In the world of outsourcing, isn’t it fairly common for a company’s data ecosystem to use a mix of on-premises systems as well as private and public clouds? An approach to analyze the company’s data must be able to interact with hybrid architectures.

The data may be partly unstructured and the rest stored in structured form such as database records.  A comprehensive data analytics solution must be able to support both formats to give a cohesive analysis.

4. Data security

The data assets of an organization need to comply with strict security measures such as confidential communication and user authentication.  This is essential when you choose a new tool for data analysis.

5. Training

What is the point of having a new technology with valuable information if there are not enough experts to use the tools well or take full advantage of the new insights? It pays to have a well-planned training for existing staff. It may make more sense to hire experts and make them champions of the transformation programs.

These factors can unearth a tremendous amount of valuable information, when assisted with a thorough analysis of the data assets of any organization. Big data can in fact position the enterprises to gain exciting insights to create an adaptive business environment with a competitive edge.

Big data and Hadoop services designed by Baryons are all-inclusive solutions that help enterprises utilize the high volumes of data.  This includes conceptualization, implementation, deployment, training and maintenance support. We help businesses to capitalize on Big Data.

The data analytics is yet in its nascent stages, but you definitely cannot afford to ignore this revolution! It makes sense to investigate every aspect of existing data. There are no magic wands of course; you still will need to map the analysis to measurable actions.  Join in and enjoy!

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So far so good, but what’s the use of data, if it cannot be useful enough? This form of data is not ‘one size fits all’. Imagine how many types of database schemas will be designed to store the various types of data. Can there be a generic template defined for say video clips of varying lengths and specifications?

Capturing the Goliath of data? Mammoth task!

Maybe the best ways to store this data is in its raw form – and not compartmentalize it into pre-defined structures. Yes, that’s it! The ‘unstructured data’ is what is called Big Data in technical terms. Big because of its huge volume! Big because it has tremendous potential to unleash the deepest of insights that businesses can leverage to their advantage.

I mean it is out there, all you’ve got to do is grab it, right?

If only it was that simple. It’s a jungle of data out there!

Picture this! Unstructured data in multiple forms needs to be fed into software intelligence programs and systems to make some useful analysis for businesses.  Of course data mining is based on this concept.

Practically on paper, you need a platform to structure the Big Data and this is where Hadoop comes in. Originally designed to be a web search algorithm, it is perfect for the Big Data scenario, since it distributes data and applications on commodity servers in the form of clusters. Concurrent processing of huge volumes of data is its USP, so as the flexibility, scalability and low cost. The fact that it is supported by a community of technical experts and is not the proprietary of any one brand (yes, it is open source software!) means it is vibrantly up-to-date with the changing trends of the market! Calling  themselves the Apache Software Foundation (ASF), this is a not-for-profit Hadoop ecosystem.

All’s hunky-dory? Perhaps not!

Like the Murphy’s law Hadoop has is not without its own difficulties:

The experts who know Hadoop are limited in number. So if companies need to adopt Hadoop, resources are not easily available. The iterative algorithms used are not effective as this concept is file dependent. Data analytics use iterative algorithms extensively, so Hadoop poses some problems there. The very advantage of Hadoop distributing data over multiple servers also poses the risk of data security, which is a big challenge for practical adoption of the technology. The available tools for the management of data and smart governance are also limited.

Is that a deterrent? No!

Challenges pose a motivation for innovation! People are trying to break the ground to overcome the problems with Hadoop as they try to unleash the full-scale potential of Big Data. New tools and techniques are emerging that are trying to address the risks and hurdles.

Toying with the idea of using Big Data for your enterprise? Have any questions and doubts in your mind? Just reach out to us at insights@baryons.net  and our experts in Big Data will be delighted to help you!

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