The significance of big data analytics is growing as businesses and end-users empower themselves with digital technologies.
According to an IDC report, worldwide revenues for big data and business analytics (BDA) will reach $150.8 billion in 2017, an increase of 12.4 percent over 2016.
Commercial purchases of BDA-related hardware, software, and services are expected to maintain a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 11.9 percent through 2020 when revenues will be more than $210 billion.
Also Read: Big data business analytics spending 2017-IDC
Data commercialization is a branch of big data analytics, where the insights derived from the accumulated data is utilised to create revenue either from cost savings or from customers.
A Forrester survey, conducted last year, found that 32 percent of surveyed data and analytics business decision makers commercialise data.
Successful stories offer lessons for CIOs to learn how they can play significant role monetising data and contribute to the growth of their organisations.
The market research firm has recently shared how the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP) transformed fan experience with using data commercialisation.
The ATP, based in Ponte Vedra, Florida, is the representative body for men’s professional tennis. Each year, the ATP conducts more than 60 tournaments around the world, overseeing 15,000 tennis matches a year.
Also Read: IBM announces big data initiatives
The ATP’s repositories contained 25 years of game data , containing many potentially valuable insights for fans, players, coaches, and journalists.
The ATP required utilising this data when it decided to expand and deepen fan engagement in terms of website traffic and a high-quality TV experience.
Therefore, it began the process of building a commercial data offering. And for technological support, the ATP selected insights service provider and platform vendor Infosys.
To craft the data and insights offering, the ATP conducted a design thinking exercise with executives in charge of the video broadcast business, commentators, a blogger, a tennis analyst, in-house tech personnel, the CIO, and architects from the vendor partner
Together, they built
- A leaderboard of players, ranking the top 75 players in categories such as best server, best returner, and best player under pressure for web viewers.
- Self-service descriptive statistics and correlations for players and coaches
- A portal for editorial team to query the data
According to the ATP, this initiative was game changing. ATP’s data commercialization project improved the tennis viewing experience for the web and television audiences.
It also aided players, coaches, journalists, and commentators with statistics derived from player and ball tracking data and chair umpire data. The data and insights offering contributed to – Increased ATP’s website traffic increased by 27 percent, helped to sketch data-based strategies for players and coaches, and reframed the sport by promoting factual analysis over intuition.
ATP’s case study indicates that the process of designing a commercial offering goes from the outside in.
Forrester points out that CIOs must determine who the potential audience is, how the audience would use the data, what their firm should deliver, and how their team should go about developing it.
Further, CIOs look to an emerging class of software- the enterprise insights platform- when the commercial offering bases insights on big data and when older paradigms like data warehousing prove unsuited to the task.
Infosys on Big data
The India-based technology major Infosys bets high on big data. Its co-founder Nandan Nilekani recently stated that big data will address issues of economic growth and jobs.
In the recent years, Infosys has increased its focus on new age technologies. It has made several acquisitions and investment on this end. The company invested in US-based data visualisation startup Trifacta and also owns a minority stake in Delaware-based big data startup Waterline Data Science.
