Day 1 of Strata World Conference 2013 sees discussions around Big Data user case studies

Inaugural day of the Strata + Hadoop World Conference 2013 on Monday in New York, USA saw delegates taking part in as many as 15 sessions. This, though, was a "warm up" to the next two days of the conference. Day One had business strategists, marketers, product managers, and entrepreneurs from around the world looking at and discussing methods on how to use Big Data to make better business decisions faster.

The BigInsights team of CEO Raj Dalal and Chief Technology Officer David Triggs attended some of the sessions to get a ringside view of where the world of Big Data was headed. One interesting session was on 'Hypercompetition and the New Rules of Strategic Management' by Mona Vernon, Lead, Emerging Technologies group at Thomson Reuters. Briefing her audience, Mona said industry leaders in IT intensive industry were outspending their peers, and getting results. She also pointed out that companies using data driven decision making principles enjoyed 5-6 per cent higher productivity, and leaders in digitial maturity had reported an increase in revenue creation (9 per cent) , profitability (26 per cent) and market valuation (12 per cent).

The next session by IBM Vice President of Big Data Products Anuj Bhambhri was equally enlightening. Called "Putting the Puzzle Together: Exploiting Big Data to Piece Together the Customer Picture", this session centred around how social media analytics could help businesses know their customers better so they could give them what they wanted in order to have them come back for more. The challenge was to build a 360 deg view of customers and gain actionable insights from the following:

1. Call center logs
2. POS transactional data
3. Geospacial
4. Social media
5. Competitor
6. Clickstream
7. Email
8. Customer Demographic

Building a richer customer profile was shown to have increased campaign conversion rates by 25+ per cent.

Susan Ettinger of the Altimeter Group spoke on the benefits of integrating social data. She told the delegates that social data lacked enterprise credibility at the moment, but it could be like a canary in a coal mine that provides an early warning,vis-a-vis customer issues. Giving an example to illustrate her point, Susan pointed out that Symantec had teams that  classified and routed for action their social media interaction with customers. These teams classified  all feedback as either a support case, Query, Rant, Rave, Lead, Request for Information or fraud.

Day One at the Strata Conference set the tone for the next two days. Day Two will be inaugurated by plenary sessions in the morning to be addressed by some biggies from the data and IT worlds like Intel, Microsoft and Cloudera. Those of you who could not make it to the conference can catch some of the sessions "Live" by clicking here.