Our CEO and Founder Kelle O’Neal facilitated this month’s webinar, Big Data Analytics — part of the ongoing Data Insights & Analytics educational series, which is a partnership with DATAVERSITY.
Kelle kicked off the one-hour webinar with a promise to cover trends and interesting new developments occurring in the world of analytics — and what they offer to the way we we’re managing data today.
The webinar covered these key sections:
- New Directions and Trends in Big Data Analytics (and Related Implications)
- Differences in Big Data Analytics Architecture
- New Tools for Leveraging More Data Types
Kelle asked a question of the webinar audience (“What data types are you analyzing?”) and offered these responses:
- Row and column (e.g., traditional relational database)
- Free-form text (e.g., email, social media)
- Geospatial (e.g., location-based)
- Images (e.g., photos and graphics)
- Audio (e.g., sound files)
- Video (e.g., animations and moving, visual images)
- All of the above
The majority of the respondents chose row and column data, which Kelle said is not surprising, given it’s the predominant need at many organizations. She noted that free-form and geospatial were the next most common choices — and also that just 10% of respondents said they’re analyzing every type of data listed above.
New Directions and Trends in Big Data Analytics
Kelle highlighted three big data landscape areas that are changing analytics and making them more relevant, available and attainable:
- We are getting better at analytics. There are more people in organizations who want to leverage analytics in their work, so that they can make their own data-driven decisions without having to depend on an analytics group. Also, there’s more awareness and adoption of analytics in our personal lives — for example, our dependency on wearable technology (Fitbit, Apple Watch, et al).
- Analytics expertise is expensive. Data scientist and Artificial Intelligence (AI) “guru-type” roles are hard to find and fill in the market and they can command high salaries — so companies are seeking more automated and repeatable ways to do data analysis.
- Software and hardware needs to catch up. Analytics are becoming more sophisticated, and this is driving technological advances and the opportunity for business users and “citizen data scientists” to automatically find, visualize and narrate the relevant findings — looking at correlations, exceptions and other predictions without having to build models or write the algorithms themselves.
As a result of these changes, different questions are being asked of data:
- Analytics needs are evolving from what happened and when did it happen, to why did it happen and how?
- Prescriptive and predictive analytics are more commonly adopted — and software companies are starting to embed these analytics into their applications as a way to provide competitive differentiation.
- Graph analytics can show relationships across multiple data types, whereas before, these connections were virtually impossible to see with structured date.
Kelle went on to call Big Data the new normal, saying it’s changed the way we view technology and how we respond to innovation. And with Big Data becoming mainstream and being integrated with other types of data, Big Data vendors are now supporting broader data types that were traditionally serviced by, for example, Master Data Management vendors.
There’s More to the Webinar Story, Like IOT
In this post, we recapped the first 20 minutes of the Big Data Analytics webinar. The rest of the webinar included the Differences in Big Data Analytics Architecture and New Tools for Leveraging More Data Types sections, which included information about the Internet of Things (IOT), AI, bots (applications that run automated tasks), “edge computing” and other advancements and their related implications for Big Data analytics.
To listen to the August webinar in its entirety — or to download and share Kelle’s presentation material with your colleagues — visit DATAVERSITY’S “on demand” webinar archive.
Analytics, BI and Data Science Webinar
We hope you join our next DIA webinar on Thursday, September 7, Analytics, Business Intelligence and Data Science: What’s the Progression? Want to stay in the know about future webinars and other First San Francisco Partners news? Let us know!
