3 Best Big Data Analytics Tools

Big data is possibly the most powerful business asset. You may be asking why? The simple answer is that big data insights can enhance an organisation’s efficiency and productivity, reduce customer churn, and allow businesses to target customers and market products and services better, increasing productivity and revenue. For big data to make this type of business impact, it needs to be collected, sorted, and interpreted. This is where big data analytics tools come in. Below we look at big data, its benefits, and some of the best big data analytics tools on the market. 

What is big data, and why is this important for businesses?

Digital transformation has taken all industry verticals by storm. With digital technology accelerating at an alarming rate, more and more consumers are turning to technology in both their personal and professional lives. In terms of big data, this means that more and more data is being collected from these technologies, which can also be referred to as data sources, than ever before. These sources include sensors, devices, video/audio, networks, log files, transactional applications, web, and social media. To explain it in simpler terms, big data refers to the accelerating volumes of data sets of information assets from several different data sources, which are stored in data warehouses and databases. 

You may be wondering why big data has become so important for businesses across sectors and why it is such a trending topic? These data structures and sets store customer information relating to demographics, locations, sales, and more. Businesses can then utilise this big data to access valuable insights into different aspects of their business. For example, a company can track customer churn patterns, or a business can identify specific customer segments for more targeted marketing or sales activities. 

Therefore, big data is an essential business asset, especially since it can be used to enhance decision-making and identify ways to increase profitability, operational efficiency, and revenue. To take full advantage of big data and to unlock its potential, the data first needs to be collected, captured, organised and translated into valuable and meaningful customer and business insights. Only once this has happened can businesses access the information required to enhance business. This is where big data analytics tools come in. 

The Benefits of Big Data 

From the above, it is clear that big data analytics tools play an essential role in businesses, especially in today’s digital climate. When used effectively and correctly, big data analytics tools offer the following benefits:

• Customer acquisition and retention – your customers’ digital information reveals a lot of important information such as purchasing behaviours, needs and preferences. Businesses can use this big data to identify customer patterns and trends and tailor services and offerings to these customers’ specific needs, therefore adding value to your customer base and enhancing the overall customer experience. This fosters brand loyalty and can positively impact sales while reducing customer churn. 
• Tailored marketing activities that show results – big data analytics tools provide businesses with information about different customer segments allowing them to customise and precisely target customers. This saves costs on marketing activities because you know you are reaching the right customer base. 
• Mitigate Risks – big data insights allow you to identify and address issues, problems and risks that might significantly impact your business. This insight and information will allow you to build risk management strategies and make informed decisions relating to potential threats. Innovate services and offerings – big data analytics are vital to developing new products and updating existing products to meet your consumers changing needs and wants. Big data insights will allow you to adapt business strategies, improve marketing activities, optimise customer services and enhance employee productivity. 
• Improve overall efficiency – big data tools enable you to extract and identify meaningful insights into operational efficiency within your business and automate processes and tasks to free up valuable time that employees can utilise for other more critical activities. 

3 Best big data analytics tools 

Now that we know what benefits a business can experience by using big data analytics tools, let’s look at some of the most popular available on the market today. 

Dataddo 

This is a no-coding, cloud-based ETL platform that has a wide range of connectors. It gives you the ability to choose your own metrics and attributes. This software aims to simplify and speed up the process of creating stable data pipelines. It also seamlessly plugs into your existing data stack, so you don’t need to add elements to your architecture that you weren’t already using or change your basic workflows. 

Knime 

KNIME stands for Konstanz Information Miner and is an open-source tool that is used for enterprise reporting, integration, research, CRM, data mining, data analytics, text mining, and business intelligence. It supports Linux, OS X, and Windows operating systems. This software is also considered to be an excellent alternative to SAS. 

HPCC 

HPCC stands for High-Performance Computing Cluster. This is a complete big data solution over a highly scalable supercomputing platform. This tool is written in C++ and a data-centric programming language knowns as ECL (Enterprise Control Language). This open-source tool is based on a Thor architecture that supports data parallelism, pipeline parallelism, and system parallelism. 

These three specific tools offer many businesses an easy and efficient way to track and analyse data. But what happens in a sector and industry that requires a data analytics tool that addresses specific and complex business needs? The answer is that many different tools are built, deployed and specifically developed to meet these requirements. One such tool is Adapt IT Telecoms CDRlive technology. 

CDRlive, A Robust Industry Specific Telecommunications Big Data Analytics Tool  

Big data is critical for Telco business success, but this means nothing if this data is not transformed into advanced analytics and insights that can drive decision-making and actions within the business. To solve this conundrum, Adapt IT Telecoms developed its accurate and complete CDRlive platform. 

This platform converts big data, which for Telcos is in the form of Call Data Records (CDRs), into actionable and valuable insights that the business can utilise. CDRs provide data relating to how users utilise a phone system, the internet, video calls, SMS, etc. CDRs provide hundreds of fields for each call record and information related to each call type. CDR’s may also include other forms of communication transmission information. 

Although this CDR data is valuable, as it stands, it does not make sense on its own. Adapt IT’s CDRlive platform utilises Artificial Intelligence and machine learning to turn these CDR’s into valuable insights that can be utilised to improve Telco operations, performance, offerings, service delivery, profitability and take advantage of the benefits outlined above. It also provides data that can be used for:

• Billing purposes which include invoicing reconciliation and validation.
• The tracking of revenue, usage as well as conducting an exploratory analysis of profitability drivers.
• Identifying the risk of fraud across voice, data and digital services. Providing regulatory support, information and understanding around optimising system usage, network integration and planning.
• The monitoring of network performance in almost real-time, which are utilised to ensure Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are met.
• Gaining insight into customer behaviour to track, predict and reduce customer churn. 
• Planning and managing the Next Best Action (NBA) from descriptive, predictive and prescriptive analytics. This provides essential information to support strategic planning and informed decision making.
• Reporting related to traffic analysis and revenue generation from roaming and interconnect traffic. This assists in facility capacity planning as well as device performance analysis.
• The effective tracking and management of ASPU, ARPU and mobile money.

Armed with this valuable insight and data, Telcos can identify ways to reduce customer churn, enhance customer experience, better target customer segments, market services effectively and ultimately enhance revenue. 

Conclusion 

Digital transformation has created an acceleration in the amount of big data available at an organisation’s disposal. But big data on its own needs to be organised and analysed, which is why big data analytics tools, like Adapt IT Telecoms CDRlive technology, have come to play such an essential role within a business. Armed with big data analytics, businesses are empowered to improve various elements of their business. For more information on Adapt IT Telecoms big data analytics tool download our CDRlive whitepaper.