Big Data & Digital Marketing

1. IBM is improving its cloud-based elastic data warehouse;

2. Cloudera announces Ibis: a project for letting data-scientists use Python directly on Hadoop;

3. Amazon is making Elastic MapReduce almost plug-and-play.

What's especially interesting about all of these announcements is that they are signs of a maturing market. No one's introducing a brand new data processing engine. Instead, IBM is improving, acquiring and competing; Amazon is streamlining; Cloudera is re-platforming; and Apache NiFi is integrating.

A common challenge when dealing with the Internet Of Things is the lack of standardization. This, in turns, makes it difficult for all of the sensors to communicate, for all of the data to be gathered, analysed and eventually leveraged.

IBM and ARM have teamed up to lower the barrier for developers in IoT: the mBed IoT Starter Kit costs just around 100eur, and can be directly connected to the IBM IoT Foundation (to channel data into IBM Bluemix serivces).

Top retailers are using Big Data to gain a competitive advantage:
predicting trends and preparing for future demand.

Synchronize prices hourly with demand, inventory and the competition.

Pinpoint customers who will likely buy your product and contact them as they wish to be reached, when they are in the right location, and engaging them with personalized real-time offers.

Retailers using big data technology are able to provide a smarter shopping experience to influence purchase decisions and edge out the competition.

At the Wimbledon tennis tournament, IBM will use a solution based on InfoSphere + Watson. This will make it possible not only to collect information just about everything that happens to the players and to the balls, but also to relate this large set of data with historical information and to query it using Natural Language.

There's more.

With so much data about each shot and player, it will be possible to analyse players' playing style. This will in turn allow the players to study their opponents' weakness and strengths to better prepare next matches.

A very interesting note.

IBM is training tennis professionals to use the data entry system, rather than training data scientists on tennis.

Yet another proof of the importance of having field experts (about the specific industry under consideration).

A recent IBM Institute for Business Value study notes that leaders are 166 percent more likely to make most decisions based on data, and 75 percent of leaders cite growth as the key source of value from analytics.

In the new IDC retail insights study: “Business Strategy: Big Data and Analytics Lay the Foundation for Revenue Growth,” it is noted that, in 2013, approximately 50 percent of retailers were using big data and analytics to inform pricing strategies, market intelligence and customer acquisition, with more retailers to join in next two to three years.

The various functions of a retail business, such as marketing, merchandising, supply chain, operations and customer service, must wear different hats at different times and should think about how others perceive their brands, as well as what they can do to enhance customer centricity.

Here are some examples of how IBM helped four famous retailers (Luxottica, BestBuy, Elie Tahari and Macys)