AvantGarde

October 2012, HBR gave the title “The Sexiest Job of the 21st Century” to Data-Scientists, I thought they are exaggerating the matter and the Big-Data explosion is just not for real.
(http://hbr.org/2012/10/data-scientist-the-sexiest-job-of-the-21st-century/ar/1)

Come this July 2013 things have changed. NASSCOM organized “Big Data and Analytics Summit 2013”. They created a special interest group and proposed that the future of IT could be analytics. The idea behind creating such group was to create India’s competitiveness as far as analytics is concerned.
(http://www.nasscom.in/bigdata/overview)

Speakers like SrikanthVelamakanni (CEO, Fractal Analytics), Ravi Vijayaraghavan (Chief Scientist, 24/7) and many more threw multiple vantage points across the topic and made us to believe that it is for real and the big data analytics has actually arrived at a bigger stage.

Putting aside all the hype and buzz, my purpose of writing this article has been to throw light on my understanding vis-à-vis Analytics and reasons that have paved the way for it, and why should a company take it seriously. I will also try to think out of box to present some of the possible future offerings.

I believe it is not something new and has been there since Google launched their search engine. The big algorithms that they wrote to crawl down the web to find relevant items matching with the keyword being searched was no less than drilling big and humongous data. Orkut, Facebook gave us an option to be friend again with the person whom we lost contact some 10 years back, wasn’t they were playing with some form of big data?

Analytics is science of examining data (text, quantitative, qualitative, etc.) to bring forth underlying information. This information can give us some undiscovered patterns or can establish hidden relationships, which can shape the decision making capability of an organization. There are two important facets of Analytics: First is practical intuitiveness, there can be hundreds of ways a given data can be analyzed, but the beauty is that none can be completely correct however it will give us some direction. The point is to chase that direction and to keep it updating with the trend. Second is real time, if a Google search engine will take one hour to list down all the possible matches, its enormousness couldn’t have been achieved. All the analysis has to be done on the fly. Company can’t compromise a customer to escape just because they were not able to understand his purpose of visit. Change they say is the need of hour, Flipkart analyzed that if they have to stay in the business they have to expand their horizon from books to all life-style products. They were fast enough to analyze their customers’ purpose of visit.

Companies like Wal-Mart, AT&T, Colgate-Palmolive, Amazon and many more had long access to vast amounts of data in the forms of scanner, serial logs but were mostly unstructured. With the advent of many analyzing Software like Hadoop, SAS, Cognos, Tableau it became easier and faster to analyze it.

Doldrums In global economic condition has barred companies vertical expansion and thus to maintain their operating margin they were forced to shrink their operating cost. That allowed companies an opportunity to think and employ methods which previously were deemed as not so mandatory rather an investment.

With wide range of competition customer retention needs focused approach for almost all companies, losing a single customer is a threat and adding even one is not an easy task. Analytics came as savior that allowed companies to target customers at the right place and at the right time.

Interning twice with Indiatimes Shopping brought me closer with web-analytics and made me ponder the possibilities that an online shopping has to offer in upcoming days. What if I am moving in Pantaloons Men’s shoes section, I am about to buy one and I receive a message from Indiatimes, “The same shoe is being offered with 25% discount, just login here”. A scanner reads the shoe data, my pantaloons card is attached to my mobile and my mobile is attached to Indiatimes. Indiatimes and Pantaloons are doing joint marketing. A win-win situation for everybody that is only possible with the help of analytics.

So, Analytics is now no more a luxury for an organization rather a hygiene factor.

Let us have small look at the current analytics industry of India

• Size of the Indian analytics Market: – 375 Million $
• No. of companies operating in this segment in India – More than 500
• Expected Indian Analytics market by 2015 – 1.15 bn $ as per Business standard report

The charts below give further information about the various types Analytics applications, location of analytics companies in India and classification of analytics industry in various business segments.

So Analytics industry in India is emerging day by day and holds the key importance for the commercial growth of India in the future to come.

References:

(1) http://www.mu-sigma.com/services/services.html
(2) http://analyticsindiamag.com/
(3) www.businessstandard.com

Nishu Navneet
MBA,IIT Kanpur
+91-9651900033
nnishu@iitk.ac.in