Business Analytics - Industry Overview.

Introduction to Business Analytics

The basic definition of business analytics refers to the skills, technologies, practices for continuous
iterative exploration and investigation of past business to gain insight and drive business planning. It
makes extensive use of data, statistical and quantitative analysis and fact based management to drive
decision making.
Business analytics involves using sophisticated technology to bring information together and
sophisticated algorithms to filter and analyse that information. The outputs can include deep
understanding of the workings of the business and its connections to the marketplace, key
performance indicators to drive business decisions, dramatic improvements in the performance of the
most critical business processes, and insights and innovations that can change the basis of
competition.
Large businesses have thousands of gigabytes of data containing billions of pieces of information. We
need specialized tools and techniques to make sense of so much information. Hence, analytics has
become a crucial part of managing any business.


Growth in Business Analytics
According to market research firm IDC the Business Analytics market is poised to reach $50.7B by
2016. With this type of growth, business analytics are now a significant line item on senior
executives agendas.
Business Analytic software is divided into three primary segments:
Data Warehousing Platform Software, which in 2011 grew the fastest at 15.2%
Analytic Applications, which grew at 13.3%;
And, Business Intelligence (BI) and Analytic Tools, which grew at 13.2%.
This growth has caught the eye of many businesses that were previously uninterested what the
technology could offer.

Recent technological developments have lowered that threshold of investment dramatically.
Information management technology at last enables dissimilar databases to talk with one
another and contribute their information to common repositories, and many corporations are
investing in the integration and quality of their data.
Sophisticated analytical tools include not only the established statistical regression and time
series methods, but also statistically-based machine learning techniques that partially
automate the processes of pattern recognition and prediction.