Big Data is dead.
Long live Big Data?
Or, if Sigma Computing CEO Mike Palmer — a self-professed “Big Data Guy” who hates the phrase — is right, maybe we need to call it something else to describe before we drive the final nail in the coffin. Call it On Demand Data, perhaps, as others have — real-time access to relevant, timely data that doesn’t involve a host of costly intermediaries to do the sorting and interpreting.
Whether customers are retailers looking to prevent stockouts and predict better merchandise mixes for, or financial firms keen on surfacing useful decisioning, the aim of his company — and platform-as-a-service providers like it — is helping end users forge a one-on-one connection with the mountains of information they have on store.
As Palmer told Karen Webster, “Large amounts of data have created some separation between the decision maker and the data that they need, and want, to make the best decision. We live in a world where companies have billions and billions of records that are all useful to them, but typically not something you can run on your laptop.”
Palmer explained that more companies are now using platform tools that can take tons of data from diverse sources — spreadsheets, SQL and Access databases and more — and surface real-time insights with high business value beyond the task at hand.
Cloud-native analytics and business intelligence (A&BI) platforms can break the hold of legacy systems, freeing data for new uses and giving companies of all sizes the processing capabilities they need to understand it. However, the users who need that data also need on demand access to it.
“Those questions change all of the time,” Palmer said. “That’s really where we’re trying to bring together the data, the curiosity that a lot of our business audience has and the technology to make them more empowered.”
Related: Measuring and Improving Customer Satisfaction Through Behavioral Analytics
Mindsets Are Changing
Storage is cheap, Palmer said, and as result, a lot of companies are holding on to information just to hold onto it. The current challenge for chief finance officers and others is making the right information available to the right people in real time, without breaking the budget in the process.
Palmer explained that often, firms resort to doing away with permissions altogether because they don’t have adequate processing capabilities.
“They extract data from their data sources and distribute it over email or through other sharing mechanisms because business users need to be able to ask questions of the data and use it on their laptop,” Palmer said.
However, playing fast and loose with data creates security, governance and compliance issues. Platforms like Sigma, he said, keep the data safely warehoused, providing an intermediary between cloud providers like Snowflake while still giving users access to what they need without running into security snags.
With data in greater demand than ever from the connected economy — and soon to make new and exotic connections in the metaverse — real-time database queries can make a splash.
“We’re talking about giving people the responsibility, but also the empowerment, to ask a question of the data directly, get an answer on demand — meaning in seconds regardless of how big that data set was — making them familiar with what data’s available to them in those data warehouses,” Palmer said.
See also: Banks And Merchants Tap Behavioral Analytics, Deep Learning to Keep Holiday Fraud in Check
The High Cost of Doing Nothing
The connected economy is all about uniting adjacent verticals and ecosystems using data. However, speed and accuracy are indispensable when driving more meaningful connections and conversions.
Finance teams tend to balk at any costs, Palmer said, but they’re facing up to the reality that “with more demand for data and more usage for data comes more cost and that they’ll have to reconcile the ROI [return on investment] on that.”
The question they need to answer internally is whether better decisions made with better data are worth the investment.
Commenting that old-school data centers are not known for being dynamic, Palmer said those feeling the most pain from this right now are involved in the hobbled supply chain.
“They have very advanced point of sale systems, they know what’s going on in the store, but connecting that with the inventory system that might have been built 20 years ago, the ever-changing situation with inventory and the logistics of distribution, these people’s jobs have become infinitely more difficult in the last couple of years,” Palmer said. “But, [it] can be made easier with data.”
That goes for retailers experiencing stockouts just as it does the financial institutions with immense data operations that have been outpaced by technology and need to catch up.
Palmer said he often wishes potential customers would ask him what they’d risk if they didn’t modernize their approach to data access, continuing: “I wish they would ask, ‘What about what if I don’t do data better, what will my business look like in two or three years? What if I do data better? How much more of a competitive advantage could I have?’”
To Palmer, it’s as basic and relevant as asking where their business might be if they didn’t adopt eCommerce or the internet in the 1990’s.
We’re always on the lookout for opportunities to partner with innovators and disruptors.
Learn More