Trends and Opportunities in Data Analysis

Andy Warhol said “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.” Here’s my 15 seconds of fame, a soundbite from the IBM Insight conference last year.

Screenshot from interview at IBM's Insight 2015 conference

My comments start at 1:30. In a nutshell, I predict that data analytics will work its way down from large companies to small companies.

One thought on “Trends and Opportunities in Data Analysis

  1. I think that is exactly right.

    Big software companies are working on democratizing data science by developing commercial off-the-shelf tools that allow a company with a single data scientist or business analyst to accomplish data analytics tasks in days that would otherwise take months of their time to set up. Of course for them the point is making money by selling these as service, but there are free “first doses” already. The Azure ML Studio is a already great way to do machine learning quickly, for exploration and deployment (and has a free service tier).

    It is still a bit of a data science project for a small business to get things like sales forecasts (data-drive, tuned to their specific case). But those cloud tools are slowly getting the data mappings built in that let them understand the data model in the software that runs the business – Dynamics NAV, Great Plains, etc. The day will come when it is a one day project for the business analyst to set up meaningful predictions with sophisticated models without having to painfully wrangle the data into R and craft the resulting reports.

    [ Full disclosure: I am a Microsoft employee actively working in this space, speaking for myself. If I sound like an advertisement, it’s because I happen to think the product is good and going in the right direction. ]

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