I recently came across a story in the New York Times about how the constant data deluge is forcing companies to come up with new ways to make sense of the mountains of data they aggregate in the course of doing business. The story takes its cue from a report by the McKinsey Global Institute called: “Big Data: the Next Frontier for Innovation, Competition and Productivity,” which suggests that a new wave of innovation related to mining and analyzing huge data sets may be under way.

Big What?

The term Big Data is often applied to data sets ranging from a few dozen terabytes to many petabytes. However, given the explosion of data, and the concurrent increases in processing power, this definition is a moving target. A better, and less geeky, definition of Big Data is data whose sheer size is beyond the ability of commonly used software tools to capture, manage and process. Regardless, since we are all keenly aware of the productivity and competitive advantage that can be gained from leveraging this data, the quest to harness and tame it never ends.

Drawing parallels to the world of distribution channel management and partner relationship management, where the data processing tool of choice is often spreadsheets, a few megabytes quickly become Big Data.

Seeing the Forest …

For channel-driven companies, the challenge of tracking and analyzing large sets of POS, inventory and claims data, causes them to continuously look for better solutions. By the time these companies realize that they need to build or buy an integrated and automated software solution, chances are they have already spent lots of time and money trying to come up with manual processes or ad hoc systems to address the data challenge. Yet, “seeing the forest for the trees” remains elusive.

The New York Times reports that “by one estimate, the amount of business data doubles every 1.2 years.” If this is even close to accurate then it’s imperative for all companies, including those who rely on multi-tier distribution channels, to ensure that they deploy highly intelligent and adaptive systems that can handle current data loads and meet future requirements, without the need to constantly feed the IT infrastructure beast.

Savvy channel companies are embracing the opportunities provided by Big Data. They are deploying automated and intelligent tools for POS Reporting, Channel Data Management, Channel Analytics and Data Visualization Dashboards. These companies will reap the ultimate reward of gaining real-time insight into their channel operations, which helps them stay one step ahead of the competition. Talk about an unfair advantage!

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