“Content” in this context means unstructured data. The need to manage unstructured data is one of the main reasons big data technologies exist – the other being the need for dealing with scale and speed. This is why it is important for us to cover at our conferences. Not every company needs to build new infrastructures around Hadoop-like technologies… yet. But marketers need to manage the mostly unstructured content that is part of their world, and also process and manage the more structured analytic data that will rapidly become “big” for even small organizations, so big data technologies need to be on marketing organizations’ radar as they continue to increase their expertise and spending on technology. See yesterday’s post on Why marketing is the next big money sector in technology.
Category: Computing & data (Page 75 of 80)
Computing and data is a broad category. Our coverage of computing is largely limited to software, and we are mostly focused on unstructured data, semi-structured data, or mixed data that includes structured data.
Topics include computing platforms, analytics, data science, data modeling, database technologies, machine learning / AI, Internet of Things (IoT), blockchain, augmented reality, bots, programming languages, natural language processing applications such as machine translation, and knowledge graphs.
Related categories: Semantic technologies, Web technologies & information standards, and Internet and platforms.
Ajay Agarwal from Bain Capital Ventures predicts that because of the confluence of big data and marketing Marketing is the next big money sector in technology and will lead to several new multi-billion dollar companies. His post is succinct and convincing, but there are additional reasons to believe he is correct.
Marketing spending more on IT than IT
Ajay opens his post with a quote from Gartner Group: “By 2017, a CMO will spend more on IT than the CIO”. It is difficult to judge this prediction without evaluating the supporting research, but it doesn’t sound unreasonable and the trend is unmistakable. Our own experience as conference organizers and consultants offers strong support for the trend. We cover the use of web, mobile, and content technologies for enterprise applications, and our audience has historically been 50% IT and 50% line of business or departmental. Since at least 2008 there has been a pronounced and steady increase in the percentage of marketers in our audience, so that 40% or more of attendees are now either in marketing, or in IT but assigned to marketing projects – this is about double what it was in earlier years. While web content management vendors have moved aggressively to incorporate marketing-focused capabilities and are now broadly positioned as hubs for customer engagement, the real driver is the success of the web. Corporate web sites have become the organizations’ new front door; companies have recognized this; and marketers are demanding tools to manage the visitor experience. Even during the peak of the recession spending on web content management, especially for marketing applications, was strong.
“Cloud” computing and workforce demographics have also beefed up marketers’ mojo. The increased ability to experiment and deploy applications without the administrative overhead and cost of IT or of software licenses has encouraged marketers to learn more about the technology tools they need to perform and helped instill the confidence necessary to take more control over technology purchases. A younger more tech-savvy workforce adds additional assertiveness to marketing (and all) departments. Now if only marketers had more data scientists and statisticians to work with…
Big data and big analytics
Big data has not caused, or contributed very much, to the increase in marketing spending to-date. Certainly there are very large companies spending lots of money on analyzing vast amounts of customer data from multiple sources, but most companies still don’t have enough data to warrant the effort of implementing big data technologies and most technology vendors don’t yet support big data technologies at all, or sufficiently. I agree with Ajay though that the “several multi-billion dollar” marketing technology companies that may emerge will have to have core big data processing and analytic strengths.
And not just because of the volume. One of the main reasons for the enterprise software bias for back office applications was that front office applications beyond simple process automation and contact data collection were just too difficult because they required processing unstructured, or semi-structured, data. Big data technologies don’t address all the challenges of processing unstructured data, but they take us a long way as tools to manage it.
The level of investment in this space is much greater than most realize. Ajay is right to invest in it, but he is not alone.
While I was still at Outsell Inc, I started writing some reports on information technologies for our publishing and information provider CEO clients. I will most likely be writing a few more similar reports for Outsell this year. While special attention is paid to the interests of publishing and information industry CEOs, the topics are all (so far) about technologies that are important to all industries. These reports are available from Outsell:
Five Technologies to Watch 2012-2013, January 25, 2012
Mobile Development Strategies: What Information Industry Executives Need to Know, November 29, 2011
Big-Data: Big Deal or Just Big Buzz?, August 2, 2011.
Informatica Corporation, the provider of data integration software, announced the immediate availability of Informatica HParser, a data parsing transformation solution for Hadoop environments. Informatica HParser runs on distributions of Apache Hadoop, exploiting the parallelism of the MapReduce framework to efficiently turn unstructured complex data, such as web logs, social media data, call detail records and other data formats, into a structured or semi-structured format in Hadoop. Once transformed into a more structured format, the data can be used and validated to drive business insights and improve operations. Available in a free community edition and commercial editions, Informatica HParser provides organizations with the solution they require to extract the value of complex, unstructured data. http://www.informatica.com
MarkLogic Corporation announced the availability of MarkLogic 5, the latest version of its product designed for Big Data applications across the enterprise. MarkLogic 5 defines Big Data by empowering organizations to build Big Data applications that make information actionable. With MarkLogic 5, organizations analyze structured, unstructured, and semi-structured data in the same application. A key feature is the MarkLogic Connector for Hadoop. www.marklogic.com
IBM unveiled new software for managing and analyzing big data to the workplace. The new offerings span a wide variety of big data and business analytics technologies across multiple platforms from mobile devices to the data center to IBM’s SmartCloud. Now employees from any department inside an organization can explore unstructured data such as Twitter feeds, Facebook posts, weather data, log files, genomic data and video, and make sense of it as part of their everyday work experience. IBM is also placing the power of mobile analytics into the hands of iPad users with a free download in Apple’s iTunes Store. The new software is designed to help employees in industries such as financial services, healthcare, government, communications, retail, and travel and transportation use and benefit from business analytics on the go. IBM is delivering new analytics and information management offerings: New Hadoop-based analytics software on the cloud, which helps employees tap into massive amounts of unstructured data from a variety of sources including social networks, mobile devices and sensors; New mobile analytics software for iPad users; and new predictive analytics software with a mapping feature that can be used across industries for marketing campaigns, retail store allocation, crime prevention, and academic assessment. http://www.ibm.com/
Adobe Systems Incorporated announced the immediate availability of Adobe AudienceResearch, a new audience measurement tool that provides publishers and digital marketers with certified metrics on the size and engagement of digital audiences for websites, mobile applications and digital magazine editions. These key metrics are captured by Adobe SiteCatalyst, an online analytics application, and provide publishers with the information critical to attract advertising dollars. AudienceResearch is available at no additional cost to SiteCatalyst customers. In conjunction with AudienceResearch, the company also announced the general availability of the Adobe Audience Certification Program. Under this program, publishers become Adobe Certified Publishers, meaning Adobe has certified that their digital audience data meets certain criteria regarding the accuracy of data collection and reporting. Adobe Certified Publishers can contribute their data to the AudienceResearch tool. AudienceResearch provides census-based measurement of metrics, meaning that the metrics are generated by counting all relevant traffic, a method considered more accurate and representative of actual traffic and behavior than panel-based methods. Panel-based methods monitor the behavior of a small group of volunteer consumers (i.e. the panel) and then use statistics to generate estimate metrics. The statistically generated results from panel-based estimates often differ significantly from census-based results and have been a point of controversy in the advertising industry. Additionally, publishers using the Adobe Digital Publishing Suite to create digital magazine editions for tablet devices may elect to have their metrics automatically certified as analytics is natively built into the Digital Publishing Suite. This native integration ensures the integrity of data collection. http://www.adobe.com/
IBM has announced a cloud-based Web analytics and digital marketing suite aimed at helping its business customers automate online marketing campaigns across digital channels, such as Websites, social media networks and mobile phones. The new IBM offering combines software from the acquisitions of Coremetrics and Unica and provides analytics that help companies fine-tune marketing campaigns and create personalised offers in real-time across online channels. For example, businesses would be able to evaluate Facebook or Twitter activity, and offer tailored promotions delivered to their mobile devices on the fly. IBM’s suite also enables businesses to deliver and fine-tune digital marketing programmes based on what customers are doing offline. For instance, a consumer who purchased a new tablet in a brick-and-mortar store would receive special offers via email to purchase tablet accessories. http://www.ibm.com
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