Learn More About Big Data Analytics Software
What is Big Data Analytics Software?
The huge amount of data that is accessible to businesses today has made it a near necessity for them to implement some type of analytics software to better understand and act on that data. Implementing big data analytics software has been a major initiative for companies undergoing digital transformation, as these tools offer deeper visibility into an organization's data. Companies adopt these solutions to make sense of large data sets collected from big data clusters.
With the ability to visualize and understand business data, employees can make informed decisions. For example, retailers can use these tools to better understand inventory distribution across their channels and make data-driven decisions based on this data. Some big data analytics solutions may offer artificial intelligence or machine learning features, such as natural language processing, as an interface capability to further aid nontechnical users.
What Types of Big Data Analytics Software Exist?
Many types of big data analytics solutions share overlapping functionality, while simultaneously catering to different user personas such as data analysts and financial analysts or providing unique services.
Because of the unstructured nature of big data clusters, these analytics solutions require a query language to pull the data out of the file system. Most commercial table databases allow SQL queries; however, big data analytics tools do not necessarily offer such SQL language capabilities and may require a more intricate knowledge of querying from a data scientist. As an alternative, some solutions may offer self-service features so that the average employee can assemble their own charts and graphs from big data sets.
Self-service big data analytics tools
Self-service big data analytics tools do not require coding knowledge, so end users with limited to no coding knowledge can take advantage of them for data needs. This enables business users like sales representatives, human resource managers, marketers, and other nondata team members to make decisions based on relevant business data. Self-service solutions often provide drag-and-drop functionality for building dashboards, prebuilt templates for querying data, and, occasionally, natural language querying for data discovery. Similar to analytics platforms, organizations use these tools to build interactive dashboards for discovering actionable insights.
Embedded analytics solutions
Embedded analytics solutions offer the ability to integrate proprietary analytics functionality within other business applications. Commonly, businesses embed analytics solutions in software such as CRMs, ERP, and portals (e.g., intranets or extranets). Businesses may choose an embedded product to promote user adoption; by placing the analytics inside regularly used software, companies enable employees to take advantage of available data. These solutions provide self-service functionality so average business end users can take advantage of data for improved decision making.
What are the Common Features of Big Data Analytics Software?
Big data analytics software helps companies get a better understanding of their data. The following are some core features of this software:
Data connectivity: If businesses cannot connect the requisite data, then there is no use for big data analytics software. The methods for connecting data include Hadoop and Spark integration which allows for processing and distribution workflows on top of Apache Hadoop and Apache Spark, respectively. In addition, this software should allow for analyzing data that is stored in data lakes, data warehouses, and data lake houses.
Data transformation: For data to be analyzed, it needs to be properly cleaned and transformed into a usable format. Big data analytics software provides features such as real-time analytics and data querying. With these features, businesses can gain a high-level view of their data in real time, allowing one to query it and better understand it. Through query languages like SQL, users can query their data and dig deeper into particular data sets and data points.
Data operations: Once the data is connected (or integrated) and transformed, it can be analyzed. Firstly, it is important to establish data workflows, which can help in stringing together specific functions and data sets to automate analytics iterations. In addition, big data analytics software provides the ability to visualize data through dashboards, as well as notebooks which can be used to create visualization with predefined or scheduled queries.
It is not always the case that one will access analytics via a standalone analytics platform. Therefore, some products provide embedded analytics capabilities. This allows users to access analytics inside business applications, which allows for more streamlined work since the users need not switch between applications.
Other Features of Big Data Analytics Software: Governed Discovery,
What are the Benefits of Big Data Analytics Software?
Data is both common and invaluable and within that data lies insights that could impact an organization's processes and performance. There are seemingly infinite insights a business can pull from their data and numerous reasons to utilize big data analytics software.
Big data analytics software helps people make decisions easier by allowing teams to gain deeper insight into their data. With increased data literacy, teams across a business, from sales to marketing to finance can become more efficient and better understand how they can improve through data-driven initiatives.
With big data analytics software, businesses can ingest, integrate, and prepare big data sources. Subsequently, they can connect all company data sources into a single platform to make cross-department connections, visualize and understand company data, encourage data-driven decision making for business optimization, and discover new insights that can enhance the bottom line.
Enable data-driven decision making: Businesses can use big data analytics software to fuel digital transformation by leveraging data to drive business decisions. Companies can leverage analytics and business intelligence (BI) tools to understand all aspects of the business, including hiring forecasts, which marketing campaign should be used to target certain demographics, which sales prospects to target first, supply chain optimization, and many others.
Measure and understand company performance: Organizations often leverage data visualization tools to track company key performance indicators (KPIs) in real time. From there, big data analytics software can be used to determine why the business is either exceeding or falling short of those important company metrics. When stakeholders develop a keen understanding of why the business is performing the way it is, they can make adjustments and pivots; if a team is falling short of a goal, they can examine and adjust processes as needed. It is one thing to simply know the performance of sales or web traffic numbers, but it is another to dig into the reasons behind it and adapt based on what is successful and what is not.
Discover new actionable insights: Analytics tools combine data from a variety of sources, including accounting software, enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, CRM software, marketing automation software, and others. Data analysts can leverage this integrated data to find correlations between different departments, and their processes and actions, to discover previously hidden insights. For example, it is possible that certain sales tactics have varying impacts on the numbers for one specific product versus another.
Analysts can discover this impact by comparing the list of closed accounts from their company CRM with products shipped in their ERP system. Teams are generally siloed and use disparate software, so these insights that were traditionally more difficult to discover, are now made easier.
Who Uses Big Data Analytics Software?
Data analysts: Depending on the complexity of the software, it is likely that analysts will be required. They can help set up the requisite queries, dashboards, and notebooks for other employees and teams. They can create complex queries inside the platforms to gather a deeper understanding of business-critical data.
Operations and supply chain teams: A company’s supply chain frequently has many touchpoints, and as a result, many data points. Therefore, employees working in operations and supply chain teams are able to use big data analytics software to gain a better understanding of their departments and the data that is generated, such as from an ERP system. These applications track everything from accounting to supply chain and distribution; by inputting supply chain data into this software, supply chain managers can optimize a number of processes to save time and resources.
Finance teams: Finance teams leverage big data analytics software to gain insight and understanding into the factors that impact an organization's bottom line. Through integrations with financial systems such as accounting software, employees such as chief financial officers (CFOs) can see how well the business is performing. As mentioned above, these employees will likely be accessing the software via self-service dashboards that were set up by data analysts. By integrating financial data with sales, marketing, and other operations data, accounting and finance teams pull actionable insights that might not have been uncovered through the use of traditional tools.
Sales and marketing teams: Sales teams also seek to improve financial metrics and can benefit tremendously from being more data-driven. Through the use of both self-service analytics tools and embedded analytics solutions, they can obtain insights into prospective accounts, sales performance, and pipeline forecasting, among many other use cases. Using analytics tools in a sales team can help businesses optimize their sales processes and influence revenue.
For marketing teams, tracking the performance of campaigns is key. Since they run different types of campaigns, including email marketing, digital advertising, or even traditional advertising campaigns, analytics tools allow marketing teams to track the performance of those campaigns in one central location.
Consultants: Businesses do not always have the luxury to build, develop, and optimize their own analytics solutions. Some businesses opt to employ external consultants, such as business intelligence (BI) consulting providers. These providers seek to understand a business and its goals, interpret data, and offer advice to ensure goals are met. BI consultants frequently have industry-specific knowledge alongside their technical backgrounds, with experience in healthcare, business, and other fields.
What are the Alternatives to Big Data Analytics Software?
Alternatives to big data analytics software can replace this type of software, either partially or completely:
Analytics platforms: Analytics platforms might include big data integrations, but are broader-focused tools that facilitate the following five elements: data preparation, data modeling, data blending, data visualization, and insights delivery.
Log analysis software: Businesses that are focused on log data might benefit from deploying log analysis software, which is used to analyze log data from applications and systems. It should be kept in mind that this software is much more limited in terms of data types and data sources to which it can be connected to. However, since log analysis software focuses on logs, it frequently provides more granular details around log-related data.
Stream analytics software: When one is looking for tools specifically geared toward analyzing data in real time, stream analytics software is a go-to solution. These tools help users analyze data in transfer through APIs, between applications, and more. This software can be helpful with internet of things (IoT) data, which one frequently wants to analyze in real time.
Predictive analytics software: Broad-purpose big data analytics software allows businesses to conduct various forms of analysis, such as prescriptive, descriptive, and predictive. Businesses that are focused on looking at their past and present data to predict future outcomes can use predictive analytics software for a more finetuned solution.
Text analysis software: Big data analytics software is focused on structured or numerical data, allowing users to drill down and dig into numbers to inform business decisions. If the user is looking to focus on unstructured or text data, text analysis solutions are the best bet. These tools help users quickly understand and pull sentiment analysis, key phrases, themes, and other insights from unstructured text data.
Software Related to Big Data Analytics Software
Related solutions that can be used together with big data analytics software include:
Data warehouse software: Most companies have a large number of disparate data sources, so to best integrate all their data, they implement a data warehouse. Data warehouses can house data from multiple databases and business applications, which allows BI and analytics tools to pull all company data from a single repository. This organization is critical to the quality of the data that is ingested by analytics software.
Data preparation software: A key solution necessary for easy data analysis is a data preparation tool and other related data management tools. These solutions allow users to discover, combine, clean, and enrich data for simple analysis. Data preparation tools are often used by IT teams or data analysts tasked with using BI tools. Some BI platforms offer data preparation features, but businesses with a wide range of data sources often opt for a dedicated preparation tool.
Challenges with Big Data Analytics Software
Software solutions can come with their own set of challenges.
Need for skilled employees: Big data analytics software is not necessarily simple. Often, these tools require a dedicated administrator to help implement the solution and assist others with adoption. However, there is a shortage of skilled data scientists and analysts that are equipped to set up such solutions. Additionally, those same data scientists will be tasked with deriving actionable insights from within the data.
Without people skilled in these areas, businesses cannot effectively leverage the tools or their data. Even the self-service tools, which are to be used by the average business user, require someone to help deploy them. Companies can turn to vendor support teams or third-party consultants to assist if they are unable to bring someone in house.
Data organization: To get the most of analytics solutions, that data needs to be organized. This means that databases should be set up correctly and integrated properly. This may require building a data warehouse, which can store data from a variety of applications and databases in a central location.
Businesses may need to purchase a dedicated data preparation software as well to ensure that data is joined and is clean for the analytics solution to consume in the right way. In the context of big data, a company might want to specifically consider big data processing and distribution software. This often requires a skilled data analyst, IT employee, or an outside consultant to help ensure data quality is at its finest for easy analysis.
User adoption: It is not always easy to transform a business into a data-driven company. Particularly at more established companies that have done things the same way for years, it is not simple to force analytics tools upon employees, especially if there are ways for them to avoid it. If there are other options, such as spreadsheets or existing tools that employees can use instead of analytics software, they will most likely go that route. However, if managers and leaders ensure that analytics tools are a necessity in an employee’s day to day, then adoption rates will increase.
Which Companies Should Buy Big Data Analytics Software?
As has often been said, data is the fuel that drives modern businesses. Although it is cliche, it no doubt has truth to it. Therefore, businesses across the globe and across industries should consider some sort of analytics solution, such as big data analytics in order to make sense of that data and begin to make data-driven decisions.
Financial services: Within financial institutions, such as insurance brokerages, banks, and credit unions, it is common for a host of different systems to be used. These companies have data ranging from customer records, to transactions, to market data, and more. With the proliferation of systems comes more data. With a robust analytics solution in place, they can get a better understanding of the data that is being produced from the various systems across the business. As an industry that is heavily regulated, users can benefit from governed access capabilities which can be particularly beneficial, since it can assist in auditing company processes.
Healthcare: Within the space of healthcare, bad data practices might have dire or even deadly consequences. Big data analytics software can help these organizations with having an overarching view of their data, such as patient records, insurance claims, finances, and more. Through the implementation of analytics, healthcare companies can lower risk and costs, and make their billing and collections smarter.
Retail: Retail organizations, whether they be B2C, B2B, D2C, or others, rely on data to make informed decisions. For example, a seller of printers, in order to run a successful business, must keep track of many things such as their inventory, sales, their sales team, and returns. If all of this data is kept siloed within different systems, there is no single source of truth and departments cannot have a conversation around the actual state of the business’ data. With big data analytics software set up and connected to all of the relevant data sources, any retail business can see benefits and make meaningful data-driven decisions.
How to Buy Big Data Analytics Software
Requirements Gathering (RFI/RFP) for Big Data Analytics Software
If a company is just starting out on their analytics journey, g2.com can help in selecting the best software for the particular company and use case. Since the particular solution might vary based on company size and industry, G2 is a great place to sort and filter reviews based on these criteria, along with many more.
As mentioned above, the variety, volume, and velocity of data are vast. Therefore, users should think about how the particular solution fits their particular needs, as well as their future needs as they accumulate more data.
To find the right solution, buyers should determine pain points and jot them down. These should be used to help create a checklist of criteria. Additionally, the buyer must determine the number of employees who will need to use this software, as this drives the number of licenses they are likely to buy.
Taking a holistic overview of the business and identifying pain points can help the team springboard into creating a checklist of criteria. The checklist serves as a detailed guide that includes both necessary and nice-to-have features including budget, features, number of users, integrations, security requirements, cloud or on-premises solutions, and more.
Depending on the scope of the deployment, it might be helpful to produce a request for information (RFI), a one-page list with a few bullet points describing what is needed from a big data analytics software.
Compare Big Data Analytics Software Products
Create a long list
From meeting the business functionality needs to implementation, vendor evaluations are an essential part of the software buying process. For ease of comparison after all demos are complete, it helps to prepare a consistent list of questions regarding specific needs and concerns to ask each vendor.
Create a short list
From the long list of vendors, it is helpful to narrow down the list of vendors and come up with a shorter list of contenders, preferably no more than three to five. With this list in hand, businesses can produce a matrix to compare the features and pricing of the various solutions.
Conduct demos
To ensure the comparison is thoroughgoing, the user should demo each solution on the shortlist with the same use case and data sets. This will allow the business to evaluate like for like and see how each vendor stacks up against the competition.
Selection of Big Data Analytics Software
Choose a selection team
As big data analytics software is all about the data, the user must make sure that the selection process is data driven as well. The selection team should compare notes and facts and figures which they noted during the process, such as time to insight, number of visualizations, and availability of advanced analytics capabilities.
Negotiation
Just because something is written on a company’s pricing page, does not mean it is not negotiable (although some companies will not budge). It is imperative to open up a conversation regarding pricing and licensing. For example, the vendor may be willing to give a discount for multi-year contracts or for recommending the product to others.
Final decision
After this stage, and before going all in, it is recommended to roll out a test run or pilot program to test adoption with a small sample size of users. If the tool is well used and well received, the buyer can be confident that the selection was correct. If not, it might be time to go back to the drawing board.
What Does Big Data Analytics Software Cost?
Businesses decide to deploy big data analytics software with the goal of deriving some degree of a return on investment (ROI).
Return on Investment (ROI)
As they are looking to recoup their losses that they spent on the software, it is critical to understand the costs associated with it. As mentioned above, this software is typically billed per user, which is sometimes tiered depending on the company size. More users will typically translate into more licenses, which means more money.
Users must consider how much is spent and compare that to what is gained, both in terms of efficiency as well as revenue. Therefore, businesses can compare processes between pre- and post-deployment of the software to better understand how processes have been improved and how much time has been saved. They can even produce a case study (either for internal or external purposes) to demonstrate the gains they have seen from their use of the big data analytics tool.
Implementation of Big Data Analytics Software
How is Big Data Analytics Software Implemented?
Implementation differs drastically depending on the complexity and scale of the data. In organizations with vast amounts of data in disparate sources (e.g., applications, databases, etc.), it is often wise to utilize an external party, whether that be an implementation specialist from the vendor or a third-party consultancy. With vast experience, they can help businesses understand how to connect and consolidate their data sources and how to use the software efficiently and effectively.
Who is Responsible for Big Data Analytics Software Implementation?
It may require a lot of people, or many teams, to properly deploy an analytics platform. This is because data can cut across teams and functions. As a result, it is rare that one person or even one team has a full understanding of all of a company’s data assets. With a cross-functional team in place, a business can piece together their data and begin the journey of analytics, starting with proper data preparation and management.
Big Data Analytics Software Trends
Data literacy
Business data is no longer locked up in silos. With big data analytics solutions, more users across a business can find, access, and analyze this data. In addition, artificial intelligence (AI) software such as natural language processing (NLP) software help make searching through and for data easier and more powerful, providing more accurate results.
Implementing analytics software has been a major initiative for companies undergoing digital transformation as these tools offer deeper visibility into an organization's data. Companies adopt these solutions to make sense of large data sets collected from all their various sources.
Shift to the cloud
The move from on-premises data analytics to the cloud has been underway for a number of years, with more and more businesses moving their data and data insights into the cloud. This is taking place for various reasons, such as time to insights. The move away from on-premises infrastructure has helped many companies enable data work anywhere one has access to the cloud—anywhere with internet access.
Conversational AI
Historically, to query data within an analytics solution, users needed to master a query language like SQL. With the rise of conversational interfaces, users uncover the data and insights they are looking for using intuitive language. Intuitive methods of querying data mean enabling a larger user base to access and make sense of company data.
Machine learning
AI is quickly becoming a promising feature of analytics solutions throughout the whole data journey, from ingestion to insights. From AI-powered data preparation to smart insights, in which the platform suggests visualizations to the end user, big data analytics solutions are quickly becoming more powerful. Machine learning is helping end users discover hidden insights, allowing them to make sense of data and helping them to understand what they are seeing.
