Being one of the largest customer science companies, Dunnhumby, leverages the power of customer data and science to drive sales and margin for its clients. AIM got an exclusive interview with Global CEO Guillaume Bacuvier and spoke to him about the analytics industry in India along with the most recent technological developments in the space.
Big data analytics sector in India is expected to witness eight-fold growth to reach $16 billion by 2025 from the current $2 billion. Bacuvier believes the analytics market, which was primarily driven by a handful of analytics firm in India has now grown to an extent that it is already among top 10 big data analytics markets in the world. Moreover, the country is seeing a flurry of startups in the space.
The increase in the number of companies who are setting up their own analytics wings has also gone up remarkably and the simple reason being Indian executives are upbeat about using analytics in leveraging it for decision making, not just for understanding what’s happened in the past but also forecasting for the future. If numbers are anything to go by, there are reports that over the next two years, a lot more organisations will invest $10 million or more for data and analytics resources.
The Challenges And Developments Ahead
Like any other industry, analytics is also not a bed of roses. There are challenges that are often always the game changer. As Bacuvier puts it, the challenges include:
- Finding and attracting the right talent (like data scientists, statisticians, etc.),
- Ensuring completeness and veracity of the data being captured
- Storing the data appropriately in data lakes and their quick retrieval
- Security, privacy and compliance issues
- Right tools, products and expertise to make business sense of the enormous amounts of data.
But despite the challenges that the industry faces, it is after all a fast growing space and is ever evolving. And when it is evolving, it also sees some remarkable technological developments. “Technological developments are taking place like “you blink and you miss”. Every other day we see some new advancement, an improved version, an enhanced upgrade in various techs and gadgets,” said Bacuvier.
Some recent technological developments in the analytics space:
- Advancements in machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) – opening new doors for businesses to make data-informed decisions
- Self-service big-data applications – speed to offer real-time solution and implementation
- Cloud solutions – scalable and sustainable for managing huge volumes of data
- Data agility – agile development and application platform supporting comprehensive assortment of analytic models
- Digital media measurement capability – Millennials want the personal touch, transparency and collaboration that one-on-one communication allows and businesses need to take advantage of this huge audience base on social messaging platforms. Brands need the right insight to optimise ad spend and to understand what works best for customers.
Bacuvier, however, warns that if organisations do not move towards being data driven, they pose a huge risk of going out of business soon.
A Quick Suggestion
But he also has a piece of advise for the younger startups, who are yet to find a sweet spot for themselves. The challenge with analytics in his view is how to make the insights and reports produced by data science actionable, and yielding effective business results. “If the results of your analytics can only be understood by other data science practitioners, they’re essentially useless and carry limited business value,” he suggested.
On Tuesday, AIM published a detailed Q&A with Guillaume Bacuvier, speaking about dunnhumby’s vision and roadmap and its journey in the analytics field so far. You can read the report, here.
