Hindsight may be 20/20, but when it comes to Big Data Analytics, foresight is where the business gains really lie. Therefore, a project by two key EMC business groups uses our newly established Business-Analytics-as-a-Service (BAaaS) offering to gain foresight into future sales and marketing opportunities. It isan exciting milestone on our journey into the world of truly advanced analytics.
The project is called MARS — a joint effort to use BAaaS to consolidate customer, sales and marketing data from multiple sources into a single data repository using the Greenplum Unified Analytics Platform. The initiative, which creates Master Analytical Records — or MARS — for each customer, will provide both Sales and Marketing with easily accessible and accurate data for advanced analysis and modeling that will guide future sales and marketing efforts.
Our BAaaS offering enables EMC’s business units to rent an “analytic workspace” with the analytics capabilities to conduct their own data analysis projects. The offering provides full access to EMC’s previously restricted corporate data assets. Users can also mine data from multiple sources beyond EMC’s traditional corporate data sources for their research. If this data proves to be valuable to the ongoing analysis, users can work with IT to get it added to the central “data hub.” This data hub is managed by IT, freeing the business from the responsibility of ensuring the data is loaded, reliable and secure.
In the case of the MARS project, EMC Sales initially sought BAaaS to set up a sandbox for forecasting sales analysis (something, by the way, that they would do using “shadow-IT” systems in the past). Around the same time, EMC Marketing was also looking for a similar set of data to do its own predictive analytics. It made sense for the two to combine their efforts to share a single analytics platform.
As a result, the two groups are leveraging BAaaS’ analytics, data integration and hosting services to provide their data scientists with the cross-enterprise data needed for predictive modeling and analysis. This enables the data scientists to use our industry-leading technologies to tap into trends and extract details that will give EMC business-enhancing foresights such as:
- Predicting what the next best product will be
- Improving insights into how to retain or win back customers
- Determining the best way to cross-sell or bundle products
- Capitalizing on technology refresh needs
- Finding new ways to tap into the best sales prospects
- Optimizing the use of pricing and discounts
This kind of exciting data mining is why we launched BAaaS. Since EMC IT officially unveiled BAaaS in early 2012, we have received steady interest from EMC business units seeking to use our comprehensive database and analytics platform to gain insight into their business.
We still have a ways to go before the analytics mindset is pervasive across EMC and we have only begun to realize all of the potential business value buried in our data repositories. But the MARS project shows that we are progressing along the analytics maturity curve. Business groups are embracing BAaaS.
It’s great to see the pioneering use cases of Big Data analytics – with the MARS project leveraging BAaaS as it was intended to be used. And also to see how BAaaS is enabling a new level of collaboration between the teams that would have been difficult prior to the introduction of the platform.
To learn more on how we are accelerating our journey to Big Data please click here to read our newly published Business-Analytics-as-a-Service white paper.
