The three aspects of analytics that have changed most over time — making analytics available to small and mid-sized organizations
Based upon the preceding information, you’d think that every business would be clamoring for Analytics; unfortunately, Analytics presented 3 initial challenges: Cost . . . time . . . and required expertise.
The first wave of Analytics solutions were expensive (hundreds of thousands of dollars), required months (not weeks) to install, configure, and deploy, and could be used only by some self-avowed ‘data geek’ down in IT.
And so only the largest organizations could benefit from the first wave of analytics. Small and mid-sized organizations could not justify the ROI of the technologies that would enable them to make better business decisions.
And then came the second – and current – wave of Analytics; with three key differentiators:
- Affordability. Analytics pricing dropped from the hundreds-of-thousands of dollars to as little as $399/month.
- Speed of Deployment. Deployment time for an Analytics solution went from months to days; today, clients can have an Analytics solution up-and-running in under a day.
- Ease of Use. A natural language query (NLQ) interface allows non-techies to use plain English requests to create analytics. Second, analytics moved from being just a ‘tool’ to including hundreds – if not thousands – of ready-made analytical reports & dashboards.
For more on ROI, see the section titled “How to Sell Analytics / Key Questions to Ask”.