The Big Data Business Advantages

Information resides at the core of every successful business venture. When a company possesses the right information at the right time, they will know precisely when and how to execute intelligent business decisions. According to HBR, the information advantage was the key to how Amazon dominated an industry by putting thousands of competing bricks and mortar bookstores out of business. When a company lacks key insights into customers and market trends, the results are usually disastrous. Significant profit generating opportunities go unnoticed, companies fail to understand how to meet customer demands, and inadequate market analysis leads companies to waste massive amounts of resources on failed business strategies. All this translates to profit loss across the board. Since companies would prefer to avoid operating blind, massive amounts of market data become critical to gaining the competitive edge in any industry.

Introducing Big Data

In the past, information management was a relatively easy task. A typical IT department would set up a string of on-site servers, provide secondary data storage technologies to protect against the loss of company data, and use the latest software to leverage results from analysis on incoming company and market data. Unfortunately, the amount of data being processed generally did not provide an accurate real-time picture of the state of an industry and its inherent trends. Over time, this created a huge demand among companies who desired to possess the ability to leverage the power of Big Data to improve their view of the markets in which they operate. As companies collected increasing amounts of data on customers and industry trends, it became evident that the rapidly growing data burden was getting out of hand. In this uncertain environment the age of Big Data had emerged.

What This Means for Companies Today

As the landscape of data management changed under the stresses imposed by Big Data on market analysis, new technologies and approaches to data management brought companies closer to harnessing real-time analysis of market trends. Companies with access to Big Data analysis obtained the advantage of being able to see emerging trends as they were occurring. Being able to position their corporate interests in the path of these trends made it easier for these companies to meet existing market demand and reap greater profits accordingly. Companies who did not possess access to such a clear and timely view of emerging market trends ended up consistently arriving at the party late. In short, this scenario suggests that the Big Data analysis advantage grants certain companies the ability to meet the bulk of market demand far ahead of competitors. By contrast, companies lacking this competitive edge will be stuck feeding on what remains from already exhausted spikes in consumer demand for which emerging market patterns and trends derive their force. As was predicted well before hand in a report generated by the IVEY Business Journal, the economic relevance of Big Data continues to emerge as a modern competitive edge for companies who invest in leveraging its deep analytical insights to enhance product sales and increase operating margins.

Big Data and the Impact on Your Company’s Future

As companies learn to mine Big Data more efficiently, it is not unrealistic to expect the number of competitors to thin within specific market niches. Aside from companies leveraging Big Data to get a jump on emerging spikes in consumer demand, these companies also use Big Data to better understand how consumers think and behave within a given niche market. In this capacity, a data savvy competitor not only maintains the edge in trend driven sales potential, but they also gain the edge on understanding how to better attract and relate to their customers. This particular insight will both significantly reduce a company’s marketing costs and produce an increase in their rate of repeat sales over the long term.

Conclusion

Long before the digital age, business owners knew that information was a pillar to obtaining and maintaining an edge over competitors in the marketplace. Today, high-speed Big Data analysis takes that concept to an entirely new level. As the science on cornering markets with Big Data analysis exalts forward thinking companies into leading positions in their respective industries, it will become evident that companies who did not take advantage of this particular trend in business technology will find it difficult to compete in markets dominated by those already possessing the Big Data analytical advantage.