Applications of Big Data

The industry today is abuzz with talks around Big Data, and yet, one doesn't hear too many use cases for it. So perceptions are abound around Big Data, like "it's expensive", "difficult to implement", "not sure how to convince the management", etc. Instead of adding more to the hype around these perceptions, we are approaching the topic a little differently. In this story, we bring you a collection of several different use cases on how various industries could benefit from Big Data. That's because if a use case sounds compelling enough, organizations are bound to explore ways of replicating it and getting the necessary budgets and approvals for it.

The good news is that all organizations don't necessarily have to implement their own Big Data setups, because doing that could be an expensive proposition, even for large enterprises. Smaller organizations could look for Big Data service roviders that offer data analysis services for their business. There are many ISVs that provide custom built-solutions as a service, which would be far more cost effective than deploying your own Big Data tools.

For instance, later in this article, we've talked about how a small tour and transport company could capture and analyzing data from the sensors in its fleet of tourist buses and use it to optimize routes, control driver behavior, reduce maintenance costs, and much more. The process of capturing and analyzing this data would be implemented by a vendor who already has the basic Big Data infrastructure in place and would be able to capture and analyze data from the sensors inside vehicles.

Besides specific use cases, we've also talked about careers in Big Data, some of the open source tools that are out there, and insights on how Big Data is different from BI and data warehousing.

Big Data for Everyone
Big Data is nothing but a collection of data sets so huge that traditional RDBMSs fail to manage them. You therefore need tools that can capture, filter, index, and provide deep insights from this data. Today, every organization is generating a huge amount of data, both structured and unstructured, thanks to social media, sensors for all types of devices, and mobility. There's a lot of insight that can be gained by capturing and analyzing all this data. These insights would be extremely useful in generating more revenue, saving cost, and so on. So there are common things that every company can do with Big Data. For instance, a company could analyze its customer reward points, costs from multiple vendors to identify and negotiate the best rates, unstructured data from social media, blogs, product reviews to identify faults, analyze internal, unstructured data like emails, consumer comments, design notes, etc to improve product
design and so on.

There's a lot of data that can be collected. The challenge is in mastering the art of visualizing data sets so that millions of inputs can be converted into easy to understand figures that bring business value. Having said that, let's look at how Big Data can be used by specific industries.

Automotive Sector and Big Data
The automotive sector can use Big Data to improve their product design, enhance customer service and driving experience, or even improve vehicle performance. Data from service partner networks: Automotive companies have huge service partner etworks, who service thousands of vehicles every day for so many different problems-warranty claims, routine service, parts replacement, fitting accessories demanded by customers, and so on. The amount of data generated from this network can be a gold mine for the automotive company if captured, collected and analyzed properly.

1. The company can create customized service offerings by region depending upon the kind of complaints received from there. This could be used to forecast the spare parts that would be required, thereby improving inventory control and distribution.

2. Parts that are getting the maximum complaints can be identified and data shared with R&D department to work on.

3. Customers buy a lot of accessories for their vehicles. This data could be analyzed to prepare special offerings, or maybe even provide them in the vehicle itself at the time of purchasing.

4. Warranty claims costs can be predicted in advance by analyzing the warranty information.

5. Data from social media could identify customer satisfaction and help win back disgruntled ones. Data from Connected ehicles: Many vehicles today have thousands of sensors that generate huge volumes of data, right from speed to oil pressure, water temperature, tire wear, fuel efficiency, and so on. This data can be analyzed and put to use.

1. A small tour and travel company could for instance, see the data from the sensors of its fleet of vehicles to learn more about them. The sensors could indicate which vehicles are getting the highest number of break-downs and why. These could then be passed onto the service partner or even the parent automotive company to provide a permanent solution.

2. Sensors could also help identify which drivers are driving rashly, over-speeding, etc and which ones are more compliant and so on.

3. Vehicle parts that are about to conk off could also be determined before-hand thereby saving the company a lot of last minute inconvenience and expenses.

Big Data in Retail and E-Commerce
It is becoming ever more challenging for retailers to sell their products at a decent profit. This is happening thanks to all the connected mobile devices like smartphones and tablets that customers carry around with them. These enable them to quickly go online and start comparing prices for the product they want to buy. How do retailers therefore ensure that they can provide the best possible deal to their customers? Big Data tools can play a key role by analyzing a whole range of structured as well as unstructured data to provide useful insights.

Here are a few of them:
1. The most basic use that most retailers have already been using is to scan through product sales data and identify the hottest selling products. They can then divert marketing budgets to promote them and also ensure they're easily approachable by customers who walk into their stores. By the same logic, retailers could find out their most profitable and loss making products and ensure that the former get more visibility.

2. You've launched a hot new product and have prepared an expensive and compelling promotion plan around it, but you'll have to wait for months before you get the sales data. Big data deployment would allow you to quickly find out whether the new product you introduced on your store shelves is a success or a failure. This can then further impact your decision to continue promoting it or stop and divert the associated marketing elsewhere.

3. The festive season is approaching, and you want to make sure you have the products that customers are likely to buy. For this, you can anticipate consumer demand before the festive season by analyzing internal data as well as external data like what people are saying about it on social media, web browsing patterns, industry talk, etc. By combining all this info, you can easily anticipate what products are likely to sell, negotiate with your vendors in advance for the best price, optimize their price against competition, and make sure they're available in stores before anyone else.

4. The growing E-commerce segment in India can really leverage Big Data to succeed. They can analyze data from the web to identify potential customers and draw them to their site. This of course, is easier said than done because of the sheer volume of data being generated on the web. Capturing and pulling out the right data is not something that traditional OLAP and data warehousing tools can do.

5. Given that the retail sector has become highly competitive, it's not only important to provide great discounts to customers, but to also get the right price from suppliers. By analyzing supplier data closely, retailers can negotiate better rates and select the right suppliers.

How Healthcare can Benefit from Big Data
There's a tremendous amount of data being generated across various health institutes in the country. Besides data from health monitoring devices, there's a lot of other patient data that's residing in unstructured format- doctor's notes, X-Rays and other medical test reports, claims and other financial data, etc. If this data can be captured and put through advanced Big Data analytics, it can yield a lot of useful information for health institutes.

Here are a few things Big Data can do to improve healthcare in India:
1. Capture monitoring data from medical equipment like blood pressure, heart rate, etc in real time and alert doctors and medical staff of serious medical conditions that may arise. Given that health monitors generate enormous amounts of vital statistics data, you need Big Data tools to be able to analyze them in real time and draw meaningful conclusions. Time is of great essence here, because if a complication is detected early, measures need to be taken early enough before it becomes life threatening for the patient. High performance analytics in Big Data can come to the rescue in this case.

2. Predicting Pandemics: Here's another major application where Big Data can come in handy. Over the past few years, our world has witnessed pandemics like never before-HINI Swine flu, HIV, Bird flu, the list goes on and on. Big data tools can be a boon for capturing information about disease outbreaks through social media channels, secondary research data about the cures, or information about availability of vaccines can all be analyzed together to prevent the disease from spreading, ensure that the vaccines are made available from the nearest location as quickly as possible, samples sent to labs for evaluation and comparisons against similar outbreaks elsewhere,
and much more.

3. Personalized medicine: Another possible outcome from big data analytics of human genomics and proteomic mapping. Patients can receive different diagnostic tests and treatment advice based on their DNA structure. But for this to happen, the human
genome sequencing needs to be done quickly, which is something that only super computers could do till now, and took many days or weeks to do. With Big Data Analytics, startup companies like Bina are able to do this sequencing in a few hours. This opens up a whole new area for the healthcare world.

4. Government and private hospitals in India generate so much data about each patient every day. Capturing and analyzing this data can help build measures for providing the right treatment, improving the quality of living, and providing the right care to patients. This unfortunately is easier said than done because of incompatible formats in which the data is generated,
outdated systems that don't capture complete patient data, etc. If captured properly and put through Big Data analytics, such patient data can be a boon for the healthcare sector.

5. Big Data in healthcare also presents a business opportunity for smaller companies and start-ups. They could collect patient billing and diagnostic data from the local hospitals and doctors in their regions to provide all sorts of useful services back to them.

Other uses of Big Data
There are lots of other industries that could use Big Data. Telcos and Banks for instance have been doing a tremendous amount of data mining and analytics already, and are therefore best positioned to use Big Data. The Govt. Met department could harness the power of Big Data to analyze and predict weather conditions and make it available to a larger and more diverse communities for the greater good. Power generation sector could start using sensors to identify faults in transmission
lines, distribute power where it's really needed, thereby reducing the cost of placing power generation sources. Data from smart meters could be utilized to analyze power usage trends to curb energy consumption and reduce losses. We could go on talking about all the use cases that Big Data can be put to, as there's no end to the number of things you can do with it. Organizations should realize that data that used to be manual and on paper has now become digital. This offers tremendous business opportunity for just about every industry out there.