London, UK. September 1, 2015 – Two-thirds of senior data and IT decision-makers in leading enterprises around the world say big data and analytics have had a significant and measurable impact on revenues, a survey by Forbes Insights on behalf of Teradata has found.
Retailers most positive about extracting value from data, according to Teradata-Forbes Insights’ survey of top decision-makers
Among the six industries surveyed, retail executives saw the biggest potential in big data and analytics. More than half of all respondents also said big data was driving innovation by allowing the discovery of new product offers.
The survey, conducted on behalf of Teradata, a big data analytics and marketing applications company, explored attitudes to big data and analytics among 316 senior data and IT decision-makers across six industries around the globe. This survey, conducted by Forbes Insights and sponsored by Teradata in partnership with McKinsey, polled senior leaders, including CxOs, EVPs, SVPs or equivalent, and “doers,” including VPs, directors, data scientists/analysts. Respondents came from a range of industries, including financial services, technology and telecom, healthcare, and retail. Geographically, 50% of the responses were from North America; 25% were from EMEA; and 25% of responses were from APAC. All respondents worked for firms with annual revenues of over US$500 million.
Across all categories of investment, about 90% of organisations report medium to high levels of investment, and about a third call their investments “very significant”.
“It’s exciting to see that companies using big data technologies are realising the impact that’s been promised for some time,” said Chris Twogood, vice president of Product and Services Marketing at Teradata. “Companies aren’t just committed to investing in big data analytics; most companies are seeing a material impact as a result of that investment. One out of five survey respondents (21%) agreed that big data analytics is the single most important path to competitive advantage, while 38% called it a top five issue.”
The results also show how companies that are most advanced with big data are also exploring many data types. The most-cited was location data (used to identify an electronic device’s physical location), collected by over half of the respondents.
This was followed by text data (unstructured data like email messages, slides, Word documents, and instant messages).
The executives’ responses also demonstrated how big data is viewed as driving innovation by creating opportunities for new business models (54%) and by monetising data for sale to external companies (40%).
However, the survey also reveals that many obstacles remain, with more than half of all respondents saying that the difficulty in adopting a data-driven culture within their organisation was the single biggest barrier to taking full advantage of big data and analytics.
Forbes Insights is the strategic research and thought leadership practice of Forbes Media, publisher of Forbes magazine and Forbes.com, whose combined media properties reach nearly 75 million business decision makers worldwide on a monthly basis.
Teradata (NYSE: TDC) aims to help companies get more value from data than any other company. The Teradata Unified Data Architecture™ is an analytic ecosystem which embraces the flow of large, fast-moving datasets, enables analytics at different degrees of integration, and supports an open model for data acquisition and discovery.
Click here to obtain a copy of the Forbes Insights Research Report.
