Insights-as-a-Service ‼️
Data is the underlying foundation. It has been driving everything in our lives for many years now. Recently, we have started appreciating the value business can derive from data. Therefore, making it one of the most important commodities of this era.
Bringing data to use is challenging 😩 😩 We usually talk about transforming data into actionable insights. This implies data has to be integrated and analyzed from all the sources. This becomes overwhelming with velocity at which data is being generated. But data’s value can only come if we are able to translate it into insights 📊
The challenge lies in identifying 🔎 the kind of data that is needed. While it may look like we have lots of data, if we look closely we may find that the information is either duplicated, or missing critical aspects or even irrelevant. To drive the business decisions we need to assess data and to determine what additional data we may require. This is why nowadays, data has been coined as a product itself.
The real dilemma that the data overload causes is, how to make meaningful sense of all the voluminous structured and unstructured data available to us. This is when Insights-as-a-service (IaaS), comes to rescue 😌 😌
We all have heard about SaaS, software-as-a-service. This was a key breakthrough where instead of downloading software on PCs we can access an application via an internet browser. Insights-as-a-Service is a distinct layer of the cloud stack positioned above SaaS. So, Insights as a service refers to a cloud-based service that provides us with action-oriented and analytic-driven solutions 🎈
How does Insights-as-a-service works 🤔
We need to appreciate the types of data required to obtain valuable insights. Majorly, organisation need to utilise three kinds of data namely : Their own company data; Usage or web data and Third party data.
This service follows a procedure
- The data is collected from various sources
- The services employs the domain experts through the process
- Data, insights and analytics are combined to generate actionable insights
- There is an Action Generator, which is part of the Insights-as-a-service solution, that is used to generate a set of actions that a business needs to take to reach its goals
- Certain Insights-as-a-service solutions offer a user interface for the business users, to view the data and analytics and to derive conclusions and lay out course of actions
This seems wonderful when organisation’s own data warehouse platforms are overstretched and often are not able to analyse the data from other sources. For instance, a telecom company that has already aggregated data on customer and their buying trends can feed from the other sources of data into their own telecommunication data, to get a picture of likelihood of upselling services.
👍 Advantages of Insights-as-a-service 👍
⚡An efficient and cost-effective environment
⚡Runs on top of SaaS application data but also works on other appropriate data types
⚡More computationally and storage intensive than analytic solutions
⚡A rapid solution for deployment
Insight-as-a-Service solutions will become essential, and more recognized as an important layer of the cloud’s stack. The companies have been putting in a quite a bit of their investment💰 💰 in this area.
The Insights-as-a-Service market size is expected to grow from USD 1.16 Billion in 2016 to USD 3.33 Billion by 2021, at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 23.5% during the forecast period.
The reason for growth is, the IaaS is cloud platform offers a secure, scalable approach to parsing and monetizing datastreams, especially for companies operating on a smaller budget.
Few companies have dedicated Insights-as-a-service solutions. Acteea, 9Lenses, Startup Genome Compass, Totango, JBara, Host Analytics, Dachis Group and 8thbridge are a few of these companies.
With data generation and data diversity rising, organizations will begin to understand the need and importance of decision making which is data driven. So, the insights-as-a-service will become pervasive in our existing framework.
Let’s talk about it 🗣️
