Planning to Adopt Data Analytics? Follow These Trends Machine learning is clearly transforming how analytical content is developed, consumed and is shared with people.

There is an increasing pressure to adopt data analytics, but with so many options available in the market how do you know which one would suit your business and what doesn't?

Hence, BIZ Experiences India decided to catch up Rita Sallam, who is a Research Vice President at Gartner's Business Analytics and Data Science team, to understand the key trends that are driving the data analytics segment.

Data Analytics Tool and Machine Learning

Sallam has seen a reasonable increase in companies that want to make analytics as pervasive as possible to improve its accessibility.

The trend is prevalent not just for easy analysis but also for advacned as organizations are keen to give access to complex data to as many people as possible across the board. She said this is been driving the market for a long time and will continue to do so.

Another key trend which has been picking is the emergence of easy to use visual based exploration tools, which also being widely deployed. However, Sallam says since data is becoming so much more complex, the tools that we have are too manual to really support the requirement at the moment

"The third key trend on the tool side is the increasing dominance of augmented analysis where machine learning is applied to the content authoring itself. Instead of manually preparing data, finding insights and sharing it, we are seeing machine learning is used to automate data preparation, how insights are found, generated and served to users," she pointed out

In other words, machine learning is clearly transforming how analytical content is developed, consumed and is shared with people.

Cloud Migration

Banking and financial services (BFSI) sector is among the late adopters of the cloud because of regulatory constraints such as privacy and safety of data. However, analytics has also been one of the last areas to move to the cloud, mainly because it makes sense to do your analysis where your data lies.

Hence, many companies for years have worked on big data from their warehouses that lie in their premise as it makes sense to do it there. But the outlook is now changing.

Sallam adds, "There is a data gravity issue as more and more data is emitting from a cloud application. So, there is a shift in the approach. However, users are also supporting hybrid data access wherein one would be able to keep the data where it is and run queries to access it through remote locations. With this, you can enjoy some of the benefits from the clouds and yet leave the data where ever you want."

To support her claim, Sallam quotes a Gartner's survey which shows that - in 2017, 72 per cent of the companies that participated said they are either deploying or planning to deploy to the cloud as against 52 per cent in 2016.

"The increase came in from the IT respondents. A lot of that I believe is driven by the fact that most of the vendors are now supporting hybrid model as it is easy to spin up a private cloud with providers like AWS. In many cases, the economics and the agility of using clouds are compelling and enough to consider it. Even though the BFSI sector is slow, the overall market is moving to the cloud," she added.

Subscription Pricing

The senior researcher has also seen action in the subscription pricing segment and pricing pressure in the mainstream side of the market.

"With the companies like Microsoft, Google and Amazon in the market where their game is not to work on our analytics but is about getting complete data into their cloud. These players are using analytics at a very lower price point so they can get customers to move to their clouds," she shared.