Database Reference
In-Depth Information
organize the floor plans to direct traffic to the areas that will maximize the
amount of money they get per visitor.
The last major type of analysis centers on unproductive inventory and stock
management. A number of years ago, a Discovery Channel special on
Walmart showcased how Walmart was ahead of its time in analytics (in that
theycouldaddweatherpatterndataintotheirinventory andstockanalysis).
For example, when a particular type of weather system was coming through
the Midwest, they knew that people would buy more of a certain type of
Pop-Tarts, and so they could automatically preorder that. Working that into
their inventory management system without anybody having to make any
decisions is a good example of this type of analysis.
For this type of event analysis, many companies factor in everything from
weather data, to traffic data, to the schedule of a big football game or a
big political event, to any other event that would drive a lot of tourism.
Any retail organization would find it incredibly valuable to integrate any
of those types of cyclical population data points. Major retail organizations
are already working hard on doing this, and some, like Walmart, have been
doing it for a number of years already.
Data Services
In today's economy, an increasing number of organizations provide, as their
sole focus, data as a service to other organizations. These organizations
take hard-to-get data and amass that data with customer data to provide
additional value—everything from integrating weather/population data as
a service (as discussed earlier with regard to the retail industry) all the
way to mapping data that companies can integrate into their websites for
things such as your closest pharmacy or grocery store. They do this by
calling a tracking application programming interface (API), and the API
takes care of it for them. These data service organizations focus intently on
the acquisition and quality of data and being able to scale the response time
of the analysis of the particular questions posed. These data companies are
veryinterestedin(andinsomecasesalreadypioneering)theuseofthesebig
data technologies.
IT/Hosting Optimization
Internal IT can also leverage the opportunities presented by Hadoop
ecosystem technologies: predicting machine failure, reviewing log data to
