Infotech Lead America: Enterprises are increasingly adopting new tools and techniques to manage the ever-increasing amount of data to use the information in critical decision making.
A survey conducted by Lavastorm Analytics, an analytics software company, says 75 percent respondents indicated that they still depend on Excel for self-service analytics processes along with at least three other tools.
R language emerged as the second most used tool, with 35 percent of respondents using it. Only 17 of the remaining 24 self-service analytics tools were used by less than ten percent of the audience.
The increased use of Big Data, Predictive Analytics and Data Discovery is causing growing interest in analytic and business intelligence (BI) software and staffing investments globally in 2013.
Nearly 60 percent of respondents plan to increase their analytic investments this year across a number of areas and tools. Current toolsets do not seem to be meeting the challenges, which according to the respondents, were of deriving insights from data (25 percent), accessing data (22 percent) and the ability to integrate and manipulate data (19 percent).
Gartner predicts that spending on information technology (IT) will increase by 4.2 percent to reach $3.74 trillion in 2013.
Respondents considered different areas of investment to be important. While 53 percent said that they would primarily invest in people, 51 percent planned to invest more in tools.
The top five areas of analytical investments were predictive analysis (51 percent) Additionally, predictive analytics (51 percent), Big Data (35 percent), dashboards (32 percent), reporting (31 percent), and data exploration and discovery (30 percent).
The focus seems to be on supporting data driven growth strategies as 27 percent of respondents plan to invest in advanced visualization tools and 24 percent will invest on self-service analytic tools for business users.
The survey reveals a shortage of analytic professionals (25 percent of respondents) and increased use of unstructured data or new data sources (27 percent of respondents). These factors were considered to be major causes of concern for the analytic community in 2013.
Big data gains momentum with 42 percent IT leaders wanting to invest
Gartner says that 42 percent of IT leaders had invested in big data technology, or are planning to do so within a year. Gartner says 20 percent of Global 1000 organizations will have established a strategic focus on information infrastructure equal to that of application management by 2015.
Recently, IDC said that the worldwide market for big data technology and services will reach $23.8 billion in 2016. A key finding from the report shows that a shortage of analytics and Big Data technology skills will drive a growing number of buyers toward cloud solutions and appliances. The IDC study segments the Big Data market into server, storage, networking, software, and services.
