Maximize the Value of Your Data with Three Types of Analytics

It seems like everyone’s talking about big data these days to achieve competitive advantage through business efficiencies, improved customer service, and industry-disrupting innovation. Gaining access to massive amounts of information is definitely important for the modern enterprise, but what you do with that data is what really matters most.

Illustration for data analytics

To start thinking more strategically about your data, imagine you’re on an analytics journey that takes you to three exciting places. Each stop along the way will help you harness greater value from the data generated by your automation systems, including enterprise resource planning, customer relationship management, e-commerce, warranty management, and much more.

Descriptive Analytics

The most basic type of data analytics is descriptive analytics, which involves using data to gain insights into your current business realities. With this type of analytics, you can gain visibility into a whole host of things, such as what it’s costing you to manage a fleet of vehicles or how successfully your marketing automation campaigns are delivering qualified leads.

Being able to generate reports about what’s going on across the enterprise helps business leaders make better decisions. And as more data is collected, you can start noting trends and patterns that can give you further insights into possible future states.

Predictive Analytics

In this way, descriptive analytics becomes the springboard to the second stop on our data journey, the realm of predictive analytics. Predictive analytics requires a more expansive use of data, combining it with sophisticated mathematical models and algorithms to discern why things are happening and to facilitate more accurate forecasting based on different data inputs.

Predictive and descriptive analytics both rely on human beings to interpret data through engaged inquiry. We must look at the data and figure out what it means. But what if machines could do that work for us instead? Machine learning is the next destination you need to explore, because it’s opening huge opportunities for businesses to accelerate innovations.

Machine Learning

Machine learning is the capability of computer systems to adapt and get better at specific tasks without explicit programming. When massive amounts of data are being analyzed far faster than people can do it, businesses can more quickly and accurately do things like anticipate and stop security breaches and fraud, diagnose diseases, personalize customer communications, conduct scientific research, and much more.

A Data Journey, Completed

As an infrastructure company, Dell EMC offers solutions to advance enterprise organizations on their data journey. Hardware is often the key factor in effective data management, and our dedicated engineers are constantly configuring Ready Solutions to help companies achieve optimal performance with critical data storage and management systems, from SAP and ScaleIO to Hadoop and Splunk. These solutions include all the hardware, software, resources, and services you need to extract value from your data faster and with less risk.

A classic example of a company that has advanced its data journey with us is Mastercard. The leading payment solutions company started using our Ready Bundle for Cloudera Hadoop for descriptive analytics. Eventually, the company started using predictive analytics to anticipate customer spending patterns and is now using advanced machine-learning algorithms to automatically shut down credit cards and notify customers when their spending patterns look like fraud.

Contact Us Today—Or Meet with Us at Strata Data

All large organizations capture and store big data, yet many don’t have the systems and processes in place to capitalize on all information they have. At Dell EMC, we know that a successful big data project doesn’t begin with the deployment of a particular technology or solution. It begins with a business use case and a strategic roadmap that will take you from where you are today to where you want to be tomorrow.

To learn more about our Ready Solutions, contact your Dell EMC representative at 1-866-438-3622 or email us at data_analytics@dell.com. You can also stop by and see us at the Intel booth at this year’s Strata Data Conference in San Jose from March 5–8. Thousands of top data scientists, analysts, engineers, and executives will be there to learn how to turn algorithms into greater advantage – you don’t want to miss it.

About the Author: Janet Morss

Janet Morss previously worked at Dell Technologies, specializing in  machine learning (ML) and high performance computing (HPC) product marketing.