Analytics made sexy with Big Data

Held at Eversheds, London, and split into two sessions, the event reflected some of the key areas of data analytics: dealing with various forms of input data and creating data visualisations.

Dominic Stubbins, Chief Architect, Esri UK and Mrunal Shridhar, Customer Solutions, EMEA, Tableau, provided an in depth look into the visual representation of Big Data, delivering a presentation on location analytics, advanced visualisation and Big Data spatial tools. The presentation indicated how organisations are able to replace static maps with data analysis across space and time.

Mrunal commented, “Current tools and technologies are limiting in nature - be it their non-visual reporting style, or the current workflows, skills and time requirements. Tableau fundamentally challenges these limitations and promoting a more self-service model that is not just visual, but iterative. This allows a normal data worker from connecting to data, to asking deep analytical questions, to sharing their findings with a broader audience.”

An exploration of the technical and practical challenges to connect data was conducted by Shorful Islam, Managing Partner, Wunderman Data and Insights. He commented: “With the ever increasing amounts of data collected regarding consumers from the various devices and touch points, the ability to connect and harness this data across these areas becomes a challenge.”

Dana Pavel, TecVis, added: “With the sheer volume of data being from unstructured sources, such as sensors, users’ context, social media, video content and weblogs creating a massive ‘data lake’, all this information has to be stored, categorised, visualised and analysed to deliver real value to a business.”

Lorraine Stone, UK Country Manager Telefonica DI and Big Data, provided an insightful look into how crowd data is creating commercial opportunities. “Smart Steps uses anonymised and aggregated mobile network data to provide extrapolated trends about the movement of anonymous crowds by time, gender, age, and mode of transport,” explained Stone.” Over the past 18 months we have built significant market momentum and delivered valuable insights for clients, enabling them to better understand and serve their customers. In this time we have also learnt a considerable amount about how to process a large volume of data and consistently extract high quality insights.”

Phil Claridge, of JDSU UK, concluded in the open forum, “The technological foundation for Big Data analysis is now well established, but continues to evolve. The challenges remain how to make [sic] capture of Big Data intrinsic to corporate operations, then how to apply the appropriate processing for the task to extract, visualise and profit from the resulting business information.”