Big Data making small wonders in the Middle East

With immense growth in technology, financial institutes, skyscrapers and malls, one can find that the number of consumers have increased exponentially in the Middle East over the past few years. Reports suggests that 91% of the population comprises of expats in UAE enjoying high salaries and tax free benefits.

Moreover, the options to spend your money have gotten bigger and better with UAE working towards the initiative to build Smart Cities setting strong infrastructure fundamentals in future. The trend to market anything and everything to consumers has gradually moved to attract customers with personalized services. In order to achieve that, businesses need to collate, maintain and manage the BIG volumes of DATA to provide efficient and effective service and engage them further to boost up revenues.

With each company wanting to cater real time promotions, it’s challenging to get such large volume of data in a structured way, able to read and analyze it and finally use it to implement new marketing strategies, product development or for better customer service.

So, how are these companies going to deliver the real time promotions and services to their customers?

The answer lies in turning Big Data into Smart Data. Big Data comes from your mobile phones, Facebook likes, You Tube videos shared, emails, pdf files, white paper downloaded, sensor chips embedded in your car and much more. The insights gleaned by big data can create smart opportunities deepening customer engagement, optimize operations, mitigate risks, and capitalize new sources of revenues. Smart Data is slowly gathering its hold in GCC region with IT companies providing solutions in retail, oil and gas, banking and hospitality industry improving business performance, underpinning new opportunities for growth. Penetration reached through analyzing transaction data, social sites, foot traffic and in-store checkout wait times have led to shifts in decision making and in-store tactics.

IT analyst firm IDC forecasts immense growth in the area, with the market expected to reach $16.9 billion in 2015 up from $3.2 billion in 2010. The growth will come from companies that are already making plans to extract intelligence from BIG DATA business analytics and from businesses complying with data storage regulations. Large investments will be made in the coming year to build infrastructure to store big data in order to deliver a lucrative platform from which structured information can be delivered in an insightful manner.

Earlier this year, Ericsson reported that consumers will be using 15 times more data by 2017 than they do today. There will be 3 billion smartphone subscriptions, 5 billion mobile broadband subscriptions and 9 billion mobile subscriptions. By 2020 there will be 50 billion connected devices worldwide.

According to IBM, “Big data is so big, in fact, that 90% of it was created in the past two years alone”.

Harnessing such huge volumes of data is going to be a challenge. Big players like IBM, EMC etc. have already recognized UAE as one of the potential market for Big Data and are trying to penetrate further with better technology and services. However, the Middle East is already experiencing too many BIG DATA players in the market and it is vital for any company to do their due diligence before making an investment.

Focusing on such knowledge sharing and networking, Dubai will be hosting Smart Data Summit 2014 on 19th and 20th May, 2014. Connecting senior executives and decision-makers from medium to large organizations across the Middle East region, Smart Data Summit are for those dedicated to making the most out of their valuable data assets leading to better management decisions.

www.smartdatadubai.com

Authored by Dept. of Marketing and Communications, Expotrade Middle East.

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