Free Essay

Big Analytics

In:

Submitted By abhiegail
Words 1996
Pages 8
REVOLUTION ANALYTICS WHITE PAPER

Advanced ‘Big Data’ Analytics with R and Hadoop
'Big Data' Analytics as a Competitive Advantage
Big Analytics delivers competitive advantage in two ways compared to the traditional analytical model. First, Big Analytics describes the efficient use of a simple model applied to volumes of data that would be too large for the traditional analytical environment. Research suggests that a simple algorithm with a large volume of data is more accurate than a sophisticated algorithm with little data. The algorithm is not the competitive advantage; the ability to apply it to huge amounts of data—without compromising performance—generates the competitive edge.
Second, Big Analytics refers to the sophistication of the model itself. Increasingly, analysis algorithms are provided directly by database management system (DBMS) vendors. To pull away from the pack, companies must go well beyond what is provided and innovate by using newer, more sophisticated statistical analysis.
Revolution Analytics addresses both of these opportunities in Big Analytics while supporting the following objectives for working with Big Data Analytics:
1.
2.
3.
4.

Avoid sampling / aggregation;
Reduce data movement and replication;
Bring the analytics as close as possible to the data and;
Optimize computation speed.

First, Revolution Analytics delivers optimized statistical algorithms for the three primary data management paradigms being employed to address growing size and increasing variety of organizations’ data, including file-based, MapReduce (e.g. Hadoop) or In-Database Analytics.
Second, the company is optimizing algorithms - even complex ones - to work well with Big Data.
Open Source R was not built for Big Data Analytics because it is memory-bound. Depending on the type of statistical analysis required, Big Data also causes issues that we’ll call “Big
Computations,” as some algorithms require a great deal of processing capacity on their own and may not lend themselves to running in every data management paradigm. For these Big
Computations, parallelism (as we’ve deployed with IBM Netezza and ScaleR) is important to performance and to the accuracy of the statistical analysis. Coupled with an intuitive R
Development Environment from Revolution Analytics, the degree of innovation exceeds that which may be achieved through packaged analytic applications.
This paper addresses specific integration between R and Hadoop that is supported by Revolution
Analytics.

Copyright 2011 Revolution Analytics

1

Advanced ‘Big Data’ Analytics with R and Hadoop

Revolution Analytics and Hadoop
Traditional IT infrastructure is simply not able to meet the demands of this new “Big Analytics” landscape. For these reasons, many enterprises are turning to the “R” statistical programming language and Hadoop (both open source projects) as a potential solution to this unmet commercial need.
As the amount of data—especially unstructured data—collected by organizations and enterprises explodes, Hadoop is emerging rapidly as one of the primary options for storing and performing operations on that data. A comment from Hadoop: The Definitive Guide, Second Edition contrasts the difference between HBase and traditional DBMSs, "We currently have tables with hundreds of millions of rows and tens of thousands of columns; the thought of storing billions of rows and millions of columns is exciting, not scary."
The marriage of R and Hadoop seems a natural one. Both are open source projects and both are data driven. But there are some fundamental challenges that need to be addressed in order to make the marriage work. Revolution Analytics is addressing these challenges with its Hadoopbased development.
Iterative vs. batch processing - If we look at how most people do analytics, it is often an interactive process. Start with a hypothesis, explore and try to understand the data, try some different statistical techniques, drill down on various dimensions, etc. This is what makes R such a powerful tool, and an ideal environment for performing such analysis. Hadoop on the other hand, is batch oriented where jobs are queued and then executed, and it may take minutes or hours to run these jobs.
In-memory vs. in parallel - Another fundamental challenge is that R is designed to have all of its data in memory and programs in Hadoop (map/reduce) work independently and in parallel on individual data slices.

Revolution Analytics’ Capabilities for Hadoop
Revolution has created a series of “RevoConnectRs for Hadoop” that will allow an R programmer to manipulate Hadoop data stores directly from HDFS and HBASE, and give R programmers the ability to write MapReduce jobs in R using Hadoop Streaming. RevoHDFS provides connectivity from tR to HDFS and RevoHBase provides connectivity from R to HBase. Additionally,
RevoHStream allows MapReduce jobs to be developed in R and executed as Hadoop Streaming jobs. Delivered in the form of free downloadable R packages, RevoConnectRs for Hadoop will be available in September 2011 from http://www.revolutionanalytics.com/big-analytics.

HDFS Overview
To meet these challenges we have to start with some basics. First, we need to understand data storage in Hadoop, how it can be leveraged from R, and why it is important. The basic storage mechanism in Hadoop is HDFS (Hadoop Distributed File System). For an R programmer, being able to read/write files in HDFS from a standalone R Session is the first step in working within the
Copyright 2011 Revolution Analytics

|

info@revolutionanalytics.com

|

650-646-9545

|

Twitter: @RevolutionR

2

Advanced ‘Big Data’ Analytics with R and Hadoop

Hadoop ecosystem. Although still bound by the memory constraints of R, this capability allows the analyst to easily work with a data subset and begin some ad hoc analysis without involving outside parties. It also enables the R programmer to store models or other R objects that can then later be recalled and used in MapReduce jobs. When MapReduce jobs finish executing, they normally write their results to HDFS. Inspection of those results and usage for further analysis in R make this functionality essential.

Copyright 2011 Revolution Analytics

|

info@revolutionanalytics.com

|

650-646-9545

|

Twitter: @RevolutionR

3

Advanced ‘Big Data’ Analytics with R and Hadoop

HBASE Overview
There are several layers that sit on top of HDFS that also provide additional capabilities and make working with HDFS easier. One such implementation is HBASE, Hadoop’s answer to providing database like table structures. Just like being able to work with HDFS from inside R, access to
HBASE helps open up the Hadoop framework to the R programmer. Although R may not be able to load a billion-row- by-million-column table, working with smaller subsets to perform ad hoc analysis can help lead to solutions that work with the entire data set.

HDFS

HBASE
R

MapReduce – Data Reduction
The processing pillar in the Hadoop ecosystem is the MapReduce framework. The framework allows the specification of an operation to be applied to a huge data set, divide the problem and data, and run it in parallel. From an analyst’s point of view, this can occur on multiple dimensions.
For example, a very large dataset can be reduced into a smaller subset where analytics can be applied. In a traditional data warehousing scenario, this might entail applying an ETL operation on the data to produce something usable by the analyst. In Hadoop, these kinds of operations are written as MapReduce jobs in Java. There are a number of higher level languages like Hive and Pig that make writing these programs easier. The outputs of these jobs can be written back to either
HDFS/HBASE or placed in a traditional data warehouse. R can then be used to do the analysis on the data.

MapReduce Job
Data
Warehouse

R
HDFS

Copyright 2011 Revolution Analytics

|

info@revolutionanalytics.com

|

650-646-9545

|

Twitter: @RevolutionR

4

Advanced ‘Big Data’ Analytics with R and Hadoop

MapReduce - R
Executing R code in the context of a MapReduce job elevates the kinds and size of analytics that can be applied to huge datasets. Problems that fit nicely into this model include “pleasingly parallel” scenarios. Here’s a simple use case: Scoring a dataset against a model built in R. This involves pushing the model to the Task nodes in the Hadoop cluster, running a MapReduce job that loads the model into R on a task node, scoring data either row-by row ( or in aggregates), and writing the results back to HDFS. In the most simplistic case this can be done with just a Map task. This simulates the “apply” family of operators in R. Other tasks such as quantiles, crosstabs, summaries, data transformations and stochastic calculations (like Monte Carlo simulations) fit well within this paradigm. These implementations don’t make any assumptions about how the data is grouped or ordered.
Visualizations of huge datasets can provide important insights that help understand the data.
Creating a binning algorithm in R that is executed as a MapReduce job can produce an output that can be fed back into an R client to render such visualizations. Other more statistically challenging algorithms can also be implemented in this framework with more effort. These would include data
Mining algorithms like K-Means clustering, logistic regression with small numbers of parameters and iterations, and even linear regression.

Copyright 2011 Revolution Analytics

|

info@revolutionanalytics.com

|

650-646-9545

|

Twitter: @RevolutionR

5

Advanced ‘Big Data’ Analytics with R and Hadoop

MapReduce - Hybrid
For some kinds of analysis, we can employ a hybrid model that combines using something like
HIVE QL, and R. HIVE QL allows us to perform some SQL like capabilities to create naturally occurring groups where R models can be created. As an example, suppose we have some stock ticker data stored in HDFS. If we can use HIVE to partition this data into naturally occurring groups
(i.e., stock ticker symbol) we could use R to create a time series model and forecast for each ticker, and do it in parallel. Another possibility might be creating a correlation matrix by using Hive and R, and feeding that into PCA or Factor Analysis routines.
Revolution has created an R package that allows creation of MapReduce jobs in R. The goal is providing a simple and usable interface that allows specification of both Map and Reduce as functions in R. This keeps the data scientist working in R, since he or she does not have to worry about the underlying Hadoop infrastructure. While it’s true that the R programmer might have to rethink the approach to how algorithms can be realized and implemented, the potential benefits justify the additional effort.

Optimizing Algorithms
Finally, there is the approach of developing algorithms that have been explicitly parallelized to run within Hadoop. For example if you wanted to do a linear or logistic regression in R on a 1TB of data stored in HDFS, this requires that the algorithms themselves be implemented in way to use a distributed computing model. Revolution Analytics has a framework for developing these kinds of algorithms to be optimized within Hadoop.

Summary
The value from analysis on structured, transactional data is well understood and much of its value has been realized. Forward-looking models and other analysis that benefit from larger, more unstructured data sets (such as models of behavioral interactions) not as well understood, yet experts suggest that this new frontier of analytics holds untapped promise.
If the enterprise has an unmet business need for strategic decision making with a high degree of processing complexity using large volumes of are predominantly unstructured data and where the analysis technique is challenging, a Revolution Analytics and Hadoop combination offers significant opportunity to gain first mover advantage.

Copyright 2011 Revolution Analytics

|

info@revolutionanalytics.com

|

650-646-9545

|

Twitter: @RevolutionR

6

Advanced ‘Big Data’ Analytics with R and Hadoop

About Revolution Analytics
Revolution Analytics is the leading commercial provider of software and services based on the open source R project for statistical computing. Led by predictive analytics pioneer Norman Nie, the company brings high performance, productivity and enterprise readiness to R, the most powerful statistics language in the world. The company’s flagship Revolution R Enterprise product is designed to meet the production needs of large organizations in industries such as finance, life sciences, retail, manufacturing and media.

Contact Us

Similar Documents

Premium Essay

Big Data Analytics

...companies in every industry are using analytics to replace intuition and guesswork in their decision-making. As a result, managers are collecting and analyzing enormous data sets to discover new patterns and insights and running controlled experiments to test hypotheses. This course prepares students to understand structured data and business analytics and become leaders in these areas in business organizations. This course teaches the scientific process of transforming data into insights for making better business decisions. It covers the methodologies, algorithms, issues, and challenges related to analyzing business data. It will illustrate the processes of analytics by allowing students to apply business analytics algorithms and methodologies to real-world business datasets from finance, marketing, and operations. The use of real-world examples and cases places business analytics techniques in context and teaches students how to avoid the common pitfalls, emphasizing the importance of applying proper business analytics techniques. In addition to cases, this course features hands-on experiences with data collection using Python programs and analytics software such as SAS Enterprise Guide. Throughout the semester, each team works to frame a variety of business issues as an analytics problem, analyze data provided by the company, and generate applicable business insights as a secondary objective, while also learning essential business analytics techniques. Students benefit...

Words: 501 - Pages: 3

Free Essay

Big Data Analytic

...Big data analytics is projected to change the way companies manage and analyze large information set and how people produce massive amounts of data. A recent findings produced by few Internet and Online Business Degree looked at the future of this trend sweeping through the IT industry. This concept is up-growing one as the current data storage pattern utilized by the companies is not as productive as plotted.  It is refers to following type of data 1) Traditional Enterprise Data:- includes customer related data ERP, CRM, web transaction  2) Machine Generated Data:- weblogs, Trading Systems etc 3) Social Data: - data of facebook, twitter, google etc.   Big Data can be seen in the finance and  business where enormous amount of stock exchange, banking, online and onsite purchasing data flows through computerized systems every day and are then captured and stored for inventory monitoring, customer behavior and market behavior. Day by day the capacity of data is increasing & many of industries are not able to manage it efficiently. By 2020, a total of 35 zeta-bytes of data will be produced as the average annual generation of information grows 43,000 percent, according to Computer Sciences Corporation.   Big data may still be a relatively new phenomenon, but its impact is already being felt throughout various industries. Organizations that can effectively store, manage and analyze this information may set themselves apart from their competitors or, even better, make key advancements...

Words: 372 - Pages: 2

Premium Essay

Big Data Analytics

...Challenges and Opportunities with Big Data A community white paper developed by leading researchers across the United States Executive Summary The promise of data-driven decision-making is now being recognized broadly, and there is growing enthusiasm for the notion of ``Big Data.’’ While the promise of Big Data is real -- for example, it is estimated that Google alone contributed 54 billion dollars to the US economy in 2009 -- there is currently a wide gap between its potential and its realization. Heterogeneity, scale, timeliness, complexity, and privacy problems with Big Data impede progress at all phases of the pipeline that can create value from data. The problems start right away during data acquisition, when the data tsunami requires us to make decisions, currently in an ad hoc manner, about what data to keep and what to discard, and how to store what we keep reliably with the right metadata. Much data today is not natively in structured format; for example, tweets and blogs are weakly structured pieces of text, while images and video are structured for storage and display, but not for semantic content and search: transforming such content into a structured format for later analysis is a major challenge. The value of data explodes when it can be linked with other data, thus data integration is a major creator of value. Since most data is directly generated in digital format today, we have the opportunity and the challenge both to influence the creation to facilitate...

Words: 7653 - Pages: 31

Premium Essay

Big Data and Analytics Developer

...Ahmed Mansour Big Data and Analytics Developer at OMS ahmedelmasry_60311@hotmail.com Summary Working in Big Data & Analytics (2014 - Present). Working in Business Intelligence (IBM Cognos) (2013 - Present). Working in ERP & Data manipulation (Oracle & Asp.net) (2011 - 2013). Skills (Pivotal HD (Hadoop),Oracle, Sql Server, MongoDB, Asp.net, JavaScript, Node.js, C#). Training (Pivotal HD Hadoop training). Master's Degree in Informatics at Nile University (2014-2016) Graduated from Faculty of Science, Cairo University (2011). Awarded (YIA) The Young Innovator Award (2010). Experience Big Data and Analytics Developer at OMS April 2015 - Present (1 month) Developing and analysis Big Data using Hadoop framework (Pivotal HD & Hawq), Hadoop Eco-System Co-Founder and Data Analyst at AlliSootak September 2010 - Present (4 years 8 months) Developing and Researcher Senior Software Developer at Fifth Dimension (5d) October 2014 - April 2015 (7 months) Senior Software Developer at Bizware August 2013 - October 2014 (1 year 3 months) Developing 2 recommendations available upon request Director of Special Projects at CIT Support May 2012 - January 2014 (1 year 9 months) Ensure that the client's requirements are met, the project is completed on time and within budget and that everyone else is doing their job properly. Senior Software Developer at I-Axiom Cloud ERP Solutions November 2011 - August 2013 (1 year 10 months) Developing Certifications The Data Scientist’s...

Words: 840 - Pages: 4

Premium Essay

Big Data and Data Analytics

...Big Data and Data Analytics for Managers Q1. What is meant by Big Data? How is it characterized? Give examples of Big Data. Ans. Big data applies to information that can’t be processed or analysed using traditional processes or tools or software techniques. The data which is massive in volume and can be both structured or unstructured data. Though, it is a bit challenging for enterprises to handle such huge amount fast moving data or one which exceeds the current processing capacity, still there lies a great potential to help companies to take faster and intelligent decisions and improve operations. There are three characteristics that define big data, which are: 1. Volume 2. Velocity 3. Variety * Volume: The volume of data under analysis is large. Many factors contribute to the increase in data volume, for example, * Transaction-based data stored through the years. * Unstructured data streaming in social media. * Such data are bank data (details of the bank account holders) or data in e-commerce wherein customers data is required for a transaction. Earlier there used to data storage issues, but with big data analytics this problem has been solved. Big data stores data in clusters across machines, also helping the user on how to access and analyse that data. * Velocity: Data is streaming in at unprecedented speed and must be dealt with in a timely manner. RFID tags, sensors and smart metering are driving the need to deal with...

Words: 973 - Pages: 4

Premium Essay

Business It World

...Date: 04-19-2015 The New Frontier: Data Analytics (Course title: Info System Decision Making) Professor: Clifton Howell Student: Deep Ajabani Data analysis is the process of finding the right data to answer your question, understanding the processes underlying the data, discovering the important patterns in the data, and then communicating your results to have the biggest possible impact. Analytics have been used in business since the management exercises were put into place by Frederick Winslow Taylor in the late 19th century. Henry Ford measured the time of each component in his newly established assembly line. But analytics began to command more attention in the late 1960s when computers were used in decision support systems. Since then, analytics have changed and formed with the development of enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, data warehouses, and a large number of other software tools and processes. In later years the business analytics have exploded with the introduction to computers. This change has brought analytics to a whole new level and has made the possibilities endless. As far as analytics has come in history, and what the current field of analytics is today many people would never think that analytics started in the early 1900s with Mr. Ford. We are going to have a look on Big Data Analytics. Let’s have a look on advantages of big data analytics. It helps marketing companies build models based on historical data to predict...

Words: 1537 - Pages: 7

Premium Essay

Big Data

...the era of ‘big data’? Brad Brown, Michael Chui, and James Manyika Radical customization, constant experimentation, and novel business models will be new hallmarks of competition as companies capture and analyze huge volumes of data. Here’s what you should know. The top marketing executive at a sizable US retailer recently found herself perplexed by the sales reports she was getting. A major competitor was steadily gaining market share across a range of profitable segments. Despite a counterpunch that combined online promotions with merchandizing improvements, her company kept losing ground. When the executive convened a group of senior leaders to dig into the competitor’s practices, they found that the challenge ran deeper than they had imagined. The competitor had made massive investments in its ability to collect, integrate, and analyze data from each store and every sales unit and had used this ability to run myriad real-world experiments. At the same time, it had linked this information to suppliers’ databases, making it possible to adjust prices in real time, to reorder hot-selling items automatically, and to shift items from store to store easily. By constantly testing, bundling, synthesizing, and making information instantly available across the organization— from the store floor to the CFO’s office—the rival company had become a different, far nimbler type of business. What this executive team had witnessed first hand was the gamechanging effects of big data. Of course...

Words: 3952 - Pages: 16

Premium Essay

Big Data

...Big Data is a massive volume of data. It's usually so massive that it becomes complicated to comprehend using tools such as on-hand database, and traditional data processing applications. Some problems that come up are storage, sharing, analysis, and search.Even though these problems do occur it still can be helpful in business operations, and better business decisions. This data can also help give companies informations which can increase profit, bring more customers, and overall increase the business's value. Characteristics of Big Data include the five V’s. The first one is volume, which is the quantity of data. The second is Variety, which the type of Data. The third is velocity, which is the speed of the data is gathered. The fourth one Variability, which is inconsistency of data can hamper processes to manage it. The final one is Veracity, which is the quality of data captured can vary. These data sets are growing rapidly mainly because they are gathered at a fairly cheap. The world's technological per-capita are doubling every 40 months. Business intelligence with data with high information density to look for trends. Big Data also increased information management specialist. Some of the largest companies like IBM and Microsoft spent over 15 billion dollars on software firms which specialize in data analytics. Governments use big data because it's efficient in terms of productivity and innovation. While gathering big data is a big benefit there are also some issues...

Words: 293 - Pages: 2

Free Essay

Internet of Things (Iot)

...Definition IoT is one of the fastest growing technologies in computing. It is an environment where people, animals, or objects are presented with unique identifiers and the ability to transfer data over a network (Rouse, 2014). It has emerged from combining wireless technologies, micro-electromechanical systems, and the internet (Rouse, 2014). See Figure 1. These wireless technologies are equipped with, or connected to a smart device allowing data collection and communication through the internet (Caron, Bosua, Maynard, & Ahmad, 2016). Figure 1. IoT Ecosystem (Medici, 2015) Benefits * Tracking behavior for real-time marketing (Borne, 2014). * Enhanced situational awareness (Borne, 2014). * Sensor-driven decision analytics (Borne, 2014). * Process optimization (Borne, 2014). * Optimized resource consumption (Borne, 2014). * Instantaneous control and response in complex autonomous systems (Borne, 2014). * Increase operational efficiency, power new business models, and improve quality of life (Harrell, 2015). * Provide an accurate analysis of customer data (Medici, 2015). Some Applications of IoF Business intelligence (BI). “The BI application ensures the analysis and measurement of the consumer’s thoughts, behaviors, relationships, buying attitudes, choices, and many more parameters that form the backbone of effective strategy building, business operations management, customer relationship management, and other business operations” ...

Words: 863 - Pages: 4

Premium Essay

Disruptive Innovation: a New Era of Crowdsourced Data Analytics!

...Disruptive Innovation: A new era of Crowdsourced Data Analytics! Abstract: The existing business paradigm of data analytics is set for a transformation. Today, companies are experimenting to replicate the “Outsourced data analytics” model to “Crowdsourced data analytics”. Companies like Kaggle, Crowdanalytix and others are hitting the headlines of top analytics blogs across the globe. The reason is that the new business model promises a drastic decrease in the cost of analytics for companies long with the flexibility to get the problem solved anytime with much less effort. In short, it’s not just crowdsourcing that is the novelty of the concept, but the manner in which it is put to use that steals the show. Abstract: The existing business paradigm of data analytics is set for a transformation. Today, companies are experimenting to replicate the “Outsourced data analytics” model to “Crowdsourced data analytics”. Companies like Kaggle, Crowdanalytix and others are hitting the headlines of top analytics blogs across the globe. The reason is that the new business model promises a drastic decrease in the cost of analytics for companies long with the flexibility to get the problem solved anytime with much less effort. In short, it’s not just crowdsourcing that is the novelty of the concept, but the manner in which it is put to use that steals the show. General Management General Management MBA Core, 2nd Year MBA Core, 2nd Year Ayush Malhotra NMIMS,Mumbai Ayush Malhotra ...

Words: 1574 - Pages: 7

Premium Essay

Assignment 1 Week 2

...The New Frontier: Data Analytics Phylicia Marie Phillips Professor Progress Mtshali, Ph. D. Information Systems Decision-Making April 17, 2016 In the past, analytics was reserved for back-room debates by data geeks producing monthly reports on how things are going. Today, analytics make a difference in how a company does business, day to day, and even minute by minute; more specifically how Walmart does business. As many know, Walmart is an American based multinational retail corporation that operates a chain of hypermarkets, grocery stores and discount stores. With over eleven thousand stores and clubs in 27 countries, information technology and data analytics play a major role in Walmart’s survival and helps maintain its competitive advantage. Data Analytics Overview The business intelligence and analytic technologies and applications currently adopted in industry can be considered as BI&A 1.0, where data are mostly structured, collected by companies through various legacy systems, and often stored in commercial relational database management systems (Bottles and Begoli, 2014). The analytical techniques most commonly used in these systems, popularized in the 1990s, are mainly grounded in statistical methods developed in the 1970s and data mining techniques developed in the 1980s (Chiang, 2012). The digitalization of information has created more data and the development of cloud computing, and faster and faster computers has made the increased data more accessible...

Words: 1438 - Pages: 6

Premium Essay

Big Data Analytics In Supply Chain Analysis

...national boundary, complex interdependencies are built into it. As the power base continues to shift from companies towards customers, customer demands have gotten more complex. Companies are looking at Big Data analytics to revamp their supply chain, thereby using Big Data Analytics as a strategic lever. Companies are collecting vast amount of supply chain related data with help of technologies such as sensors, Barcode and GPS, Jacob House (2014). Big Data Analytics offers companies the ability to leverage on the enormous amounts of information driving their global supply chains, Harvard Business review, (2013). Companies are aware that Big Data can be leveraged at various levels of a business. This holds true for supply chain management also. The combination of large, high velocity and varied structure of big data and advanced analytics tools and techniques represents the next frontier of supply chain innovation, Libor K, Christian G, and Michele B...

Words: 7496 - Pages: 30

Premium Essay

Bizintel

...of my company, I am not familiar with the names or metrics used to evaluate important data, but I do know from experience and part of my job function, reports and data gathered are used to make judgments and decisions about new products and constant improvements for existing services we currently provide. Surveys are completed by our travel partners and guests, and even employees. We compile reports and present them to management electronically. Our research, experience, and use of different applications, along with our IT departments, helps management and executives determine which direction to move forward. Feedback from our travel partners and guests are both direct and indirect. Upon learning about programs such as Google Analytics, the importance of webpage layout, the amount of time spent on our site, as well, as how often individuals contact our chat system and sales automation for assistance with our product gives insight to “how we are doing” as a company. Constant looping and revisiting certain pages...

Words: 526 - Pages: 3

Premium Essay

Brief Overview of Business Intelligence and How Walmart Uses It

...biggest retailer in the world and handles more than one million customer transactions every hour and generates more than 2.5 petabytes of data storage (Venkatraman & Brooks, 2012). To put this into perspective, this data is equivalent to 167 times the number of books in America’s Library of Congress (Venkatraman & Brooks, 2012). So how can Wal-Mart use this massive amount of data and what useful information can this data provide? This paper will provide a brief overview of the importance of Business Intelligence (BI) and how the largest retailer in world, Walmart, is using it. BI platforms help management to truly understand its customer base and deliver individualized products and services (Brannon, 2010). When BI tools and analytics are used effectively, managers and decision makers can yield an all-encompassing view of the company, its position in the market, and its potential and perspectives (Albescu, and Pugna 2014). BI is best explained as a systematic process not found in a magazine, online or in a knowledge database. An organization that doesn’t have a viable BI capacity is making decisions without key information in this competitive market (Thomas, 2001). Walmart has more customer connections than any retailer in the world, from online activity to in-store purchases, and even social mentions (300,000 social mentions per week) (SAS Institute Inc.). Due to the abundance of information requiring analysis, Walmart created Walmart Labs after the company took...

Words: 867 - Pages: 4

Premium Essay

Business Analytics

...Introduction Sprint has nearly 54 million customers and offers a host of products for consumers, businesses and government. The company recently began using analytics tools to try to make sense of the mountains of data created by Sprint network users on a daily basis. With approximately 70,000 employees worldwide and nearly $27 billion in annual revenues, Sprint is widely recognized for developing, engineering and deploying state-of-the-art network technologies, including the United States' first nationwide all-digital, fiber-optic network and an award-winning Tier 1 Internet backbone. Sprint provides local voice and data services in 18 states and operates the largest 100-percent digital, nationwide wireless network in the United States. The decision to focus our project on Sprint was based on a couple of factors. Sprint is currently the 3rd largest telecom operator in USA and with the recent take over by SoftBank the prospects to grow look promising. This provides a clear opportunity to help the business grow using analytics. Secondly because of our connections in the company we were able to get more information on Sprint’s analytics strategy and future plans. Recommendations Sprint Telecom is part of an industry, which is one of the largest providers of data in the world. Sprint’s initial big data steps have been in the right direction. They have successfully used their current data sets for quick profits and short-term results. It is now time to take the jump...

Words: 652 - Pages: 3