The economy has disappointed in 2011, and 2012 looks similar. In the US, the housing crisis and high unemployment persist. The euro debt crisis threatens Europe with recession. Healthier regions like Asia are too small and too export-oriented to escape a downturn in the West. The best macro case appears to be halting progress on structural issues and continued weak growth.

Despite this, IT spend in banking and financial services grew in 2011 and looks poised for modest growth in 2012. Why is this happening? Banks and securities firms feel pressure both to reduce costs and to innovate. There are multiple ways to cut costs but the only way to simultaneously reduce unit costs and innovate is through (more…)

With the world becoming connected through social media platforms and the use of internet more extensive than ever, there has been a massive explosion of data and content. This has led to an unprecedented need for scaling solutions that store and process data. The traditional approach to address such data growth is to buy progressively more powerful hardware until the database can serve all the traffic.

Even larger companies have dealt with the horror of this scalability as they resorted to using traditional relational databases, eventually hitting limits that were unviable both financially and operationally. Google once ran off of 40,000 MySQL installations and Facebook was at one point spending $1M per month for specialized database hardware to serve their pictures.  These unviable solutions led to a re-evaluation of existing database technologies and led to the Not-Only-SQL (NoSQL)  movement. (more…)

Recently, I was accompanied by Boris Evelson of Forrester Research and Ajoy Kumar, leader of Virtusa’s data warehousing and business intelligence practice for a webinar on Pervasive Business Intelligence.  In the webinar, with attendees from industry and blogging community, Boris and Ajoy discussed the issues associated with pervasive business intelligence as well as best practices and benefits organizations can expect to derive from BI.

Before Boris (@bevelson) began his session, I asked him “what is your definition of pervasive BI?”  His answer was a company in which BI is everywhere, data and information are readily available, and an organization which is poised to compete not only on the basis of its goods or services but on the quality of its decisions as well.  That definition places a culture of “informed decision making” at a premium and views BI as a vehicle to deliver the information upon which critical decisions are based.

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In the first part of this series of post, we had discussed on how social media is rapidly gaining ground and extending its influence sphere. In continuation to the earlier post, this post will delve on the deepening influence of social media in an enterprise value chain, by aligning business process for social intelligence.

Evolving Enterprise Value Chain

A great validation of the Mobile use of Facebook is that 60% of subscribers access through mobile browsers and most active mobile users are in Indonesia, South Africa, Kenya, Canada and the US, where at least 60% of Facebook users spend just as much time on a mobile device as on the desktop. The collaboration between social media tools and mobile operators and app developers has created a revolution in the adoption rate of social media across the deepest parts of developing and developed worlds alike. (more…)

The topic of social media is going through a major hype. There is so much buzz around social tools that everyone wants to be a part of this bandwagon. As enterprises try to catch up with the buzz, many companies are starting to realize that it is difficult to define tangible business outcomes around social media investments.  Moving beyond basic marketing and brand awareness through social media is becoming a challenge. Recently we have started seeing some focus on social intelligence and social analytics, which are helping companies, move one step closer to defining a goal-oriented strategy around social media. (more…)

This is in continuation to previous blog post “Actionable Web Analytics part-1”, in which we discussed about web analytics and its benefits. In this post we will discuss some more benefits.

1.   Trial to non-trial conversion

All the trial users can be effectively monitored by their application usage so that eventually they can be converted to subscribed/paid users. Using web analytics one can:

a.   Identify critical success factors for trial to non-trial user conversion such as frequency of usage and which features are being tested by the user etc

b.   Analyze the failed cases and make the program robust by focused marketing and training efforts to the trial users who are using the application sparingly. (more…)

Web analytics has evolved to become a serious business now. Gone are the days when web analytics was something you just added on to your application as an afterthought but today, it is considered a major feature that gets discussed up front in business circles when planning for a Web application and building a business case. What exactly is driving this tremendous change for Web analytics? To answer that we need to review the myriad business benefits you can get out of Web analytics provided you have planned and designed for it.

Web analytic tools can collect, analyze, measure and report on Internet data which will help in understanding user behavior and application usage. The data captured using other sources, like CRM tools, can only help inform reactive action and not proactive measures. For example, it is possible to identify how many users cancelled their subscriptions using tools like sales force, but not how many users will cancel. With Web analytics, customer usage patterns and associated pain points can be identified up front and that can help companies be proactive about those pain points and, hopefully, in the end game, retain those “at risk” subscriptions.  But, that is just one example out of many more “business benefits” you can expect to get out of using web analytics. (more…)