2012 will undoubtedly see big data remain high on the agenda of big businesses. In fact, recently the Obama administration shared plans to spend $200 Million on a ‘Big Data’ initiative. According to Deloitte, by the end of 2012 more than 90 percent of the Fortune 500 will likely have at least some Big Data initiatives under way. Ovum research reports 50% of global enterprise IT investment decision makers plan to spend on Big Data analytics in the years to come. Why this hype? Organizations believe that with the skyrocketing data volumes, big data holds the key to getting ahead of the competition, and most importantly could help to improve the experience of the life-blood of their organization, their customers.
In today’s competitive and “always-on” business environment, it's critical that organizations are not sinking with the volume of data but have the relevant information at their fingertips when needed. Take a CIO for example, he needs to understand how his enterprise IT department enables and affects business outcomes. Intelligence about revenue-generating transactions, customer interactions (are they using tablets, mobile devices, browsers? etc), usage consumption patterns (cost per business transaction, per application or per user) — all become handy information for technology executives.
Today, customers expect not just availability but immediacy, and are unforgiving for slowness and failure to complete their transactions with the business (e.g. querying about the terms of service before asking about its price). Businesses that can't guarantee an always-on, speedy service and cannot respond to issues quickly enough could be rapidly held accountable.
Clearly, in order to generate this level of real-time Big Transaction Data analysis a business will need to access and analyze huge amounts of data throughout the customer journey. This is considered daunting by many not just because of the need to analyze such vast data and put it into relevant context but also collecting it from the multiple different touch points at which the business interacts with customers is complex. This is where Big Transaction Data initiatives come into play.
Customers are executing transactions every second through applications they're interacting with. Whether the customers are using an online billing portal, a website login, a tablet, mobiles or putting their card into a chip and pin terminal — they’re executing a business transaction. Whenever they use these applications, a transaction is created that travels through a business' IT infrastructure at lightning speeds.
Capturing and ongoing management of all business transactions 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and creating a real-time map of what is occurring in their infrastructure is what big transaction data is all about. Turning your IT management into a big transaction data initiative gives you the innovative edge to immediately get business context to your unstructured data — that is revenue generating transactions! This way, the business wins, IT wins.
Big Transaction Data is enabled by Business Transaction Management (BTM) to automatically discover and collect data, dynamically map into business context (revenue-generating transactions), continuously monitor every single transaction taking place across their business. This allows for agile response when and how a transaction has failed in real time and further, making use of such information to proactively keep user experience failures or even slowness from occurring in the first place.
In short, big data can be an incredibly useful asset to organizations looking to improve the business outcomes. However, for that to happen, you must find the big data that provides the business insight to enable you to monitor, analyze and act instantly at all times. Big Transaction Data provides a powerful, business-relevant and dynamic solution.
Linh C. Ho is VP of Corporate Marketing at OpTier.
