Amazon:
See How Big Data Can Drive Business Success
July 03, 2014 by Bernard Marr
Amazon is a big data giant, which is why I want
to look at the company in my second post of my series on how specific
organisations use big data.
We all know that Amazon pioneered e-commerce in
many ways, but possibly one of its greatest innovations was the personalized
recommendation system – which, of course, is built on the big data it gathers
from its millions of customer transactions.
Psychologists speak about the power of
suggestion – put something that someone might like in front of them and they
may well be overcome by a burning desire to buy it – regardless of whether or
not it will fulfil any real need.
This is of course how impulse advertising has
always worked – but instead of a scattergun approach, Amazon leveraged their
customer data and honed its system into a high powered, lazer-sighted sniper
rifle. Or at least that is the plan - they don't seem to get it completely
right yet. Like most of us, I have had some very strange recommendations from
Amazon.
Anyway, their systems are getting better and it
looks like what we have seen so far is only the beginning – as I’ve previously
mentioned, Amazon has recently obtained a patent on a system designed to ship
goods to us before we have even decided to buy it – predictive despatch – you
can read more about that here. This is a strong indicator that their confidence is
reliable predictive analytics is increasing.
An important factor to consider when looking at
Amazon is how commercial its big data is, compared to those of other companies
that deal with data on a comparable scale. Unlike, say, Facebook – which might
know an awful lot about which movies you like or who your friends are – the
vast majority of Amazon’s data on us relates to how we spend hard cash.
And having worked out how to use it to get more
money out of our pockets, it is now setting out on a mission to help other
global corporations do the same – by making that data, as well as its own tools
for analyzing it, available to buy.
This means that, as with Google, we have started
to see adverts driven by Amazon’s platform and based on its data appearing on
other sites over the past few years. As noted by MIT Technology Review last
year, this makes the company now a head-on competitor to Google – with both online
giants fighting for a chunk of marketers’ budgets.
However, ad sales is not the only arena in which
Amazon is taking on Google – its Amazon Web Services offers cloud-based
computing and big data analysis on an enterprise scale. This allows companies which
need to run highly processor-intensive procedures to rent the computing time
far more cheaply than setting up their own data processing centres – just like
Google’s BigQuery.
These services include datawarehousing
(Redshift), hosted Hadoop solution (Elastic Map Reduce), S3 – the database
service it uses to run its own physical warehousing operations and Glacier, an
archival service. Recently added to this list is Kinesis, which is a real-time
“stream processing” service designed to aid analysis of high volume, real-time
data streams.
Amazon has also incorporated big data analysis
into its customer service operations. Its purchase of shoe retailer Zappos is
often cited as a key element in this. Since its founding, Zappos had earned a
fantastic reputation for its customer service and was often held up as a world
leader in this respect. Much of this was due to their sophisticated
relationship management systems which made extensive use of their own customer
data. These procedures were melded together with Amazon’s own, following the
2009 acquisition.
Finally, it is worth mentioning the public data
sets that Amazon hosts, and allows analysis of, through Amazon Web Services.
Fancy digging around in the data unearthed through the Human Genome Project,
NASA’s Earth science datasets or US census data? Amazon hosts all of this and
much more, and makes it available for anyone to browse for free.
Amazon has grown far beyond its original
inception as an online bookshop, and much of this is due to its enthusiastic
adoption of big data principles. It looks set to continue breaking new ground
in this field, for the foreseeable future.
-------------------I really appreciate that you
are reading my post. Here, at LinkedIn, I regularly write about management and
technology issues and trends. If you would like to read my regular posts then
please click 'Follow' (at the top of the page) and feel free to also connect
via Twitter, Facebook and The Advanced Performance
Institute.
About : Bernard Marr is a globally recognized
expert in strategy, performance management, analytics, KPIs and big data. He
helps companies manage, measure and improve performance.
Pesquisa, Divulgação: Miguel Moyses Neto Se gostou
desta matéria , divulgue para seus amigos.
Visite nosso linkedin http://br.linkedin.com/pub/miguel-moyses-neto/28/971/9aa---Twitter: @mikenetIT onde VC poderá ver as principais
agencias de noticias e os links das empresas & nomes mais famosos do mundo!
ou simplesmente visite nosso blog :
|
Bremense Participacoes
Ltda
| |||
|
|
|
|
Desde 1940
|
|
| |||
Nenhum comentário:
Postar um comentário