Career Prospects in Business Analytics and Optimization

Data is available anywhere and everywhere. But which portion of it is actually useful? How can the useful data be transformed into a strategic and powerful business asset? Big organizations are always in search of solutions to question like these, as they are the key driver to their company’s growth, performance and returns. Business Analytics & Optimization is the domain that is booming nowadays and provides visionary business solutions, in order to help the organizations to grow by leaps and bounds.

It helps the corporates evaluate market trends and business strategies in the highly competitive environment. Giving a cutting edge to organizations, Business Analytics is making bigger waves by helping companies by eliminating the risk factors and completely transforming the financial processes. With the ever-evolving IT market, the aspirants of B. Tech. Computer Science & Engineering with specialization can see their dream of a successful career in the industry coming true!

Moreover, Did You Know? As per a report by Blueocean Market Intelligence and Nasscom, the business analytics market in India is expected to touch US Dollar 2.3 billion by 2018. Now, what can be a better chance to ride the tide of this thriving sector other than B. Tech. Computer Science & Engineering with specialization. Even from an organization’s view point, it helps anticipate any opportunity and then taking the right action to make a positive impact. Not just that, the advanced business analytics helps across entire value chains to measure, plan, report, and predict to propel the overall profitability of an organization.

Business Analytics and Optimization will enable them to play a key role in giving a steady technological direction to an organization. Ranging from product development to operations, and, finance to information systems, Business Analytics and Optimization Consultants are in great demand nowadays to help businesses reshape themselves and gain a strong footing in the market. As businesses are always looking out for ways to increase their effectiveness and efficiency, there is a surging demand for professionals in the domain to analyze any quantitative problems and formulate solutions and put those outputs into effect.

This program provides students a comprehensive understanding to use advanced data mining technology to identify any risk factors, thereby helping reduce any fraudulent activities that might take place. It helps them analyze the big data properly so as the turn them into actionable insight at the right time. Moreover, it gives the students a better insight as to how they can sync an organization’s operations with demand and benefit from the upcoming opportunities in a jiffy.

Opening up opportunities galore in Package implementation, as BAO Infrastructure Specialists, Data Warehousing Specialists, BI/BAO Specialist and Architects, BI/BAO Project Managers, System Administrators and many others, a career in Business Analytics and Optimization will help you become an important part of the global revolution and evolution in business analytics and optimization with a B. Tech. Computer Science & Engineering program in the same.

A Business Analytics Training Institute Provides the Training for Business Professionals

When someone has a business, they want to make sure that they have the proper training on how to run the business. The business analytics training institute is going to be a place that they will be able to learn what they need for their business. The professionals will be able to understand what they need to do for business.

This is going to help them keep their operations running smoothly too.There are a lot of things that have to be coordinated in order to make that happen. The type of company that a person is running will have a big impact on this also.

Every company will have different things that they will be doing. Each one of them will offer something different for each of their customers. The production process and much more will have to coordinate with everything else also.

Choosing the necessary supplies and much more will be very important when considering how to run a business. The way that supplies are ordered will be important. Sometimes, ordering by larger quantities will give companies and opportunity to save money on their supplies.

This is only going to be possible if the company has a place to store the ones that will not be used up right away though. This is something that has to be considered closely. There are many decisions to make when running a company.

These decisions need to be based on what can benefit the company though. Just because a company wants to expand to having several more products, it does not mean that they can just do that. The research about the type of product and how effective it is will have to be done.

There are a lot of companies that expand their product line too early and end up suffering in the end because of it. There are several different options to getting the best information. Some people rely on the past history of the company and how they have handled the expansions.

Other companies are going to rely on the popularity of the type of item and feedback from their consumers. The economy will also be a big factor as well. If someone is marketing a travel product, but not many people are traveling, it is unlikely to be much of a hit.

The season that these products are introduced during will play a factor also. This is something that will be very important as well. This can affect the future of the product also.

There are some products that are only used during certain seasons. This is why they need to make sure that everything is researched and thought out well before making any big decisions. One costly mistake could shut the company down and nobody wants that to happen.

Businesses are run in many different ways. Sometimes, the products will sell themselves. Other times, there will be some time involved before consumers pick up on the idea of them. It is difficult to know what is going to be a good product to sell and what is not.

Getting the proper training in business analytics will help the companies grow and succeed. The managers will be able to make decisions based on what the company needs to have in order to stay afloat and grow. Growing quickly is not always a good thing though.

A business analytics training institute is going to show their students the tools necessary to succeed with their business. They will show them how to use each of the many tools that are out there to help them. Some of them are easier to understand than others, but all of them will be very important to understand.

Let’s Get Personal With Predictive Analytics

Marketing is all about showing why consumers need your product. But it certainly includes some element of prediction – what do people want or need and how can it be related to your product?

This is called predictive analytics – the skill of scrutinising data and using the information to work out what customers want, before they know they want it. Phew!

How can predictive analytics improve your marketing?

Profiling your customers can certainly help you to figure out their next move. Retailers for example know that if someone is buying toddler clothes, they could target their marketing for primary school clothes a year later and so on.

Data is everywhere, it’s almost like a game of chess except the consumers are in constant check mate when marketers really understand how to use it right. So clever and so useful.

It may sound like it’s all very manipulative but if you look at it from a consumer’s point of view- they are getting tailored adverts to their needs (less annoying) rather than general adverts that they’ll blatantly ignore. A vegan fitness fanatic isn’t going to want to see fast food adverts, or real-fur coats (grim) and likewise, someone who is bulking on a meat-heavy protein diet won’t be happy receiving meat free burger coupons.

Creating a Single Customer View

Nowadays this goes a lot further than name, age, email and occupation. Understanding someone’s personality as well as all their other details means that the quality of communication is taken to the next level. Using a Single Customer View and combining it with predictive analytics, the accuracy of predicting the consumers next move, before they know what it is, is hauntingly accurate.

Knowing your customers better than they know themselves

Everybody’s favourite online merchant, Amazon, took predictive analytics one step further and in 2014 patented the idea of boxing and shipping products that it expected customers to buy based on their search history and previous purchases. Then if the customer decided that they actually needed the item, they could pay for it. Such an idea might lead to unwanted deliveries and possibly even returns, but Amazon seems willing to still take the hit, stating in the patent, “Delivering the package to the given customer as a promotional gift may be used to build goodwill.”

Are the predictions too good to be true?

Researchers from Ohio State University recently discovered that targeting adverts based on behavioural indications improved click-through rates by up to 670% compared to adverts that were not behaviourally targeted. People notoriously worry about their data being misused, for example sold on without their consent however they have shown to like and respond to targeted marketing. So when their data is used correctly, it benefits the customer and the company.

So, it’s clear that predictive marketing is a game changer. Do you have the tools and resources to know what your customers will want next week?

Why Use Google Analytics?

It amazes me how many people will say that their website is not working for them, yet when asked if they measure the traffic or use a tool such as Google Analytics, the answer is usually ‘I don’t know’ or ‘I think I have login’.

Now the fact is many companies websites do not work for them and are not generating enough, or the right kind of traffic. However, as with any form or marketing, measuring is absolutely critical, so that you can see what is working, what is not working and adjust your strategy accordingly.

Unfortunately some people do not measure their web traffic at all. This may because they are unaware that tools such as Google Analytics are actually FREE, and can be installed relatively easily with a basic understanding of HTML code. If you are lucky enough to have a good content management system, then this is made even easier without needing any understanding of website coding. Of course most good web development companies should do this for you as part of the process of launching a website.

I think it’s fair to say that some people who have started to investigate Google Analytics have often only scratched the surface of how powerful this FREE tool actually is.

The most common use is probably checking on how much traffic a website receives, along with the source of the traffic and which keyword someone has typed, if they have arrived via a search engine.

However Google Analytics can provide so much more relevant and useful information, for example, ‘Bounce Rate’ can be a very important piece of data, this means the percentage of single page visits where the visitor left your site from the landing page without continuing to view any other pages of the site. So you might have lots of traffic, but if your bounce rate is high then this would suggest the page is not relevant to visitors and your site is probably not working for you. Conversely, this may be the very page your specific campaign is targeting. In this case the ‘bounce rate’ should not be discouraging.

You can also view the average time people are spending on your website, again if this figure is low and you are not receiving enquiries, just like ‘bounce rate’ this might suggest that your site is not perceived as being relevant by your website visitors. It could also be an indication that navigation to other relevant pages, for instance a ‘contact us’ feature, is not clear.

Top Exit pages can be another great piece of information, if visitors are browsing various pages of your site, but you are losing them without receiving enquiries then you may need to review your top exit pages and try tweaking/improving these.

Google Analytics is an amazing, under utilised tool with features that could fill a manual. The purpose of this article is simply to highlight it’s availability so that your business can start benefiting from it’s application.

Video Analytics For Security and Surveillance – An Introduction

Security cameras traditionally only displayed video requiring the viewer to identify problems. Video analytics takes video feeds from security cameras and automatically identify problems without a human operator even looking at the video This has the potential to significantly reduce the need for security monitors while simultaneously improving security.

The most common form of video analytics used in security is perimeter violation. Cameras are positioned to view a fenceline or other exterior area to determine if an intruder is breaking in. When the video analytic software detects a person crossing in, it sends a message to the PC of the operator. The operator can then immediately check the video (even if the operator had been engaged in another activity). Furthermore, the operator can use the camera to track where the intruder goes to help responders track and intercept the suspect.

The most significant concern with the use of video analytics is how well they work. Security operations generally require that the video analytics systems generates minimal false alerts. While it can vary by level of security, most operations cannot handle more than a dozen false alerts per day. Beyond that, operations tend to lose faith in the effectiveness of the system and ignore the alerts.

Video analytics are being offered for other applications including abandoned objects, removed objects, loitering and slip and falls.

The two most popular ways for deploying video analytics are running the analytics inside a camera (often called a “smart camera”) or inside a server (often inside the DVR or digital video recorder). Smart cameras is the more popular approach in the industry but generally requires the purchase of new cameras (existing cameras generally do not have the power to run analytics). Running analytics inside the DVR is often favored by organizations that want to save money and use video analytics with their existing cameras.

Tips for Using Google Analytics to Track Traffic and Website Visitors

Google Analytics is a free tool that Google provides. They give you a small piece of code that you can copy and paste into your website. Once the code is installed, Google will provide you with reports that summarize all of the important aspects of your website. Google Analytics will help you track data points like the keywords people are typing to find your website; the state, county or city they were logged in from, the time of day and more. There are dozens of data points that can be tracked using this tool and all of it provides helpful information. Use this information to build better marketing programs and learn more about your customers.

Google Analytics has several layers of reporting. Some areas to pay attention to are unique visitors, bounce rate, referring websites, most visited pages and most exited pages as well as the keywords people are using to find your website. You can get much more complex in your analysis but in my experience, these data points provide a nice snapshot of your website performance. Let’s take a look at what each one of these things means.

Unique Visitors – This is a metric that tracks how many individual people have actually visited your website. It will not count multiple visits by the same person but will instead track the number of actual individuals that visit your site.

Bounce Rate – This refers to the number of people that land on your website and bounce-off. This means that they spent less than a few seconds on your website, realized it was not what they wanted and left immediately. Bounce rates are a good indication of how well your website is designed, optimized and laid out. A high bounce rate on a specific page of content can be an indication that something is wrong. You’re always going to get bounces from robots and search engine spiders that land on your website, index quickly and then leave; you’ll also have bounces from incorrect internet searches or accidental clicks that may get delivered from social media websites. While there are several benchmarks to measure your bounce rate against, the official Google Analytics blog considers it to be normal to have up to a 40% bounce rate. Ideally, you’d have much less than that, trying to get it as low as you possibly can, but 60 percent is a commonly used metric to measure a typical website bounce rate. There is also evidence to suggest that Google uses data from Google Analytics to rank sites, and sites with lower bounce rates can see their rankings affected positively.

Referring Websites – This is a helpful piece of data as it will tell you which websites, blogs and social media marketing platforms are referring people to your website. This can help you determine which areas to focus on. For example, if you’ve noticed a lot of referring visitors coming in from LinkedIn, then it might make sense to spend more time sharing your content there. Of if you’ve noticed a certain website or blog that linked to you and is now sending you a lot of website traffic, it might make sense to find similar websites or blogs to work with to help you generate even more referrals.

Most Visited Pages – This is pretty self-explanatory and will detail out a list of the most popular pages of your websites. This can helpful in determining which products, services or information your consumers are most interested in. This can be helpful for a variety of reasons and can even be used to develop other marketing strategies. For example, if you notice particular interest in a specific piece of content, you might want to focus more of your marketing dollars on that specific item.

Most Exited Pages – Also pretty self-explanatory. This will help you discover what pages people view last, right before leaving your website. This can be helpful for discovering areas of your website that need improvement. Or, if the most exited page is your request a quote page then maybe you’re doing something right. Either way, the data is helpful in determining what your strengths and weaknesses are when it comes to the website visitors you attract.

Keywords – Another area to pay attention is the keyword section. This will help you discover what keywords people are searching with and finding you for. This can be helpful in building out specific pages of your website. For example, if you notice that people are describing your products or services in different terminology (an example would be Café vs Coffee Shop) then it might make sense to dedicate a section of your website to focus on that specific keyword. If nothing else, start optimizing your website content to include some of these keywords, leveraging the data in Google Analytics as evidence that people are looking for you using these specific keywords.

Having Google Analytics installed will help you measure the performance of your website and it’s been said that what gets measured gets managed. By keeping an eye on your websites performance you’ll have a good idea of what is working and what can be improved upon. It will also provide clues and ideas to help you develop additional marketing strategies, products or services to serve your customers with. Google Analytics is a must and is definitely the most affordable (it’s free) website analytics program available. We also believe that sharing as much with data with Google as possible is beneficial for website performance and rankings. It helps them track changes and updates that occur within your website and will even provide feedback on which areas can be improved. As long as you’re following proper best practices and guidelines, the data and feedback you’ll get will be far more helpful than any anecdotal advice or insight you can get from an independent marketing consultant or agency.

Why You Need Analytics For Your Website

Do you need analytics for your website? In a word, heck yes. Okay, that was two words, but you get my point. Analytics are must for every site. They are able to tell you exactly what your customers are doing on your site, where they are coming from, what they are consuming, and where they are bailing. You can then use this information to improve your site to increase ROI, duration, bounce rates, conversions, or whatever your goals are.

“What analytics solution is the best?”

It all depends on your situation. If you are a small company or an individual with a blog, Google Analytics is a great solution because it is free, offers robust reporting capabilities, and has a large support base.

If you are a larger corporation, you may want to start with Google Analytics just to get people used to the metrics and the reporting cycle. It is a good way to get everybody’s feet wet and get a full understanding of what data is available, how the data can be used, and what is most important from the top executives down to individual departments. Then, start a full-scale analytics solution provider search where you test out and understand what Omniture, Webtrends, etc. provide. Knowing what you want and need can help you see through the sales pitch and get down to brass tax. Keep in mind the vendor is typically very expensive, so it is an important decision to make. Spend the time necessary finding the solution that is best for you.

“When should I start using analytics?”

Immediately. If you have a site now with no analysis software, find something now.

If you are in the planning stages, plan to have a solution up and running the second your site goes into production. Lost time is lost revenue.

“But, aren’t analytics hard?”

Sure, they can be hard, especially if you let them be hard. Keep your goals in mind when doing metrics and try to stick with a few key metrics that tell you if you are meeting your goals. As you get increasingly comfortable with analytics, branch out and find those long tail nuggets that could help boost ROI, customer engagement, whatever your goals demand. For the larger corporations, it is best to invest in smart people to do the analytics for you. The investment will pay off in the short and long term.

As you can see analytics are a must and it is highly advisable to get a solution up and running as soon as possible. Delaying can cost money, customers, or a chance to build community.

5 Benefit of Google Analytics in SEO

Internet marketing has definitely become one of the hot favorites of the business world. Every size of company is running after the tools of internet marketing. Companies spend huge money behind the internet marketing. But it is also important that they should also analyze the efficiency of the keywords used in the content of their website. This is also an important aspect of internet marketing. You must get an idea about the performance of the keywords, and their ability to draw more visitors. It is always good to know that how the visitors are interacting with the website. So, is there any way out through which you can make an assessment of these details? Well, definitely yes. Google Analytics is a tool which can be used for these purposes. You can use it to measure the effectiveness of the keywords in generating the traffic. Google Analytics is a must have tool during a SEO campaign, and it comes for free.

To make you more about this must have tool; let’s have a brief look at the top five benefits of Google Analytics in Search Engine Optimization.

1. There are many such tools in the market. Most of them come with the same features and purpose. But in order to use those software, you may have to spend some money from your pocket. But as we said that Google Analytics is complete free software which can you use without any hassle. Moreover, Google Analytics offers much more functionalities than the paid software.

2. It is always important to know that how the visitors are locating your website. It definitely helps you a lot in understanding your needs and requirements. With the help of Google Analytics, you will be able to optimize the keywords in a better way. Google Analytics will enable you to know about the potential keywords, which are always looked for. So, gradually you will be able to catch up more keywords, and better keywords.

3. Google Analytics will also provide information about the links and pages which are the favorite of the visitors. It does help you in many ways. You can analyze those popular websites and their methodology for optimization. You can even check that whether you SEO campaign have been able to direct the traffic or not.

4. Visitor segmentation is an important aspect of internet marketing. It shows the number of new visitors to your website. It is a great way to analyze the effectiveness of your SEO campaign.

5. Finally, you will be able to fine tune your website. After a detailed analysis, you will be able to identify the weak parts and the loose bonds. Therefore, you can work on those areas to make you SEO campaign more effective and efficient. This will automatically enhance the quality of your SEO campaign, and will bring more visitors to your website.

An Insight Into Big Data Analytics Using Hadoop

The large heap of data generated everyday is giving rise to the Big Data and a proper analysis of this data is getting the necessity for every organization. Hadoop, serves as a savior for Big Data Analytics and assists the organizations to manage the data effectively.

Big Data Analytics

The process of gathering, regulating and analyzing the huge amount of data is called the Big Data Analytics. Under this process, different patterns and other helpful information is derived that helps the enterprises in identifying the factors that boost up the profits.

What is it required?

For analyzing the large heap of data, this process turns very helpful, as it makes use of the specialized software tools. The application also helps in giving the predictive analysis, data optimization, and text mining details. Hence, it needs some high-performance analytics.

The processes consist of functions that are highly integrated and provides the analytics that promise high-performance. When an enterprise uses the tools and the software, it gets an idea about making the apt decisions for the businesses. The relevant data is analyzed and studied to know the market trends.

What Challenges Does it Face?

Numerous organizations get through various challenges; the reason behind is the large number of data saved in various formats, namely structured and unstructured forms. Also the sources differ, as the data is gathered from different sections of the organization.

Therefore, breaking down the data that is stored in different places or at different systems, is one of the challenging tasks. Another challenge is to sort the unstructured data in the way that it becomes as easily available as the accessibility of structured data.

How is it used in Recent Days?

The breaking down of data into small chunks helps the business to a high extent and helps in the transformation and achieving growth. The analysis also helps the researchers to analyze the human behavior and the trend of responses toward particular activity, decoding innumerable human DNA combinations, predict the terrorists plan for any attack by studying the previous trends, and studying the different genes that are responsible for specific diseases.

Benefits of Big Data Analytics:

There are three classifications under which the benefits can be divided:

Cost Savings: The software helps the business in storing the massive amount of data and getting rid of spending the amount on the traditional database. The data is usually stored in the clusters and further transferred to the traditional database for further analysis as and when required.

Competitive advantage: The analytics help the organizations to access previously unavailable data or that data that was difficult in accessing. Hence, this increase in data access help to understand the product and work on it accordingly like planning the business strategies; hence, facing the competitive challenges.

New business offers: It helps in exploring the trending business opportunities. Many enterprises use the collected for knowing the customer trends and launching the new product ranges.

Hence, this analytics software is helping the organizations, to grow their business by boosting the sales, revenues turnovers, the marketing end results, reducing risks or improvising customer handling experience. An efficient analyst is of great importance to the organizations and learning all about its concepts can be done through a formal training of Hadoop, which is a widely chosen software, around the globe.

Semiconductor Industry in the Era of Big Data and Analytics

This article is all about the impact of big data in the semiconductor industry. First let me explain what big data is.

It is the data sets whose size are beyond the ability of typical database software to capture, store, manage and analyze. Big data has the following characteristics:

1. Complex data sets which is normally massive and measured in petabytes

2. Thousands of dimensions for each data element

3. It is a blend of different types of data – semi structured or unstructured data amalgamated across various sources

Its trend in the semiconductor industry can be explained using 3 V’s (Variety, Velocity, and Volume)

Variety – technological varieties for future semiconductor chips

Velocity – faster performance with smaller size and lower power consumption.

Volume – IC is present everywhere and the amount of data it carries will reach an uncountable number.

The following methods help in analyzing and handling the big data

1. Collecting data:

The field nodes, which are the sensors embedded around us, collect data and transfer it to the central cluster using the network for analysis. Pattern recognition and decision-making are the techniques on which the central network relies for real-time operations

2. Extracting useful Information:

Companies use machine learning techniques to extract meaningful data from the larger data sets. A Support Vector Machine is a powerful machine-learning algorithm often used for classification of large data sets.

3. Real-time analytics:

The data sets keep refreshing due to its large content and effective collection of data. CPU takes information from the Cache, RAM, and hard disk. But most of the technologies prefer in-memory computing. The memory has to be closer to the processor for easy refresh and computing. Therefore, we need a larger Cache for easy refresh of data.

4. Chip for the future:

According to some researchers, next generation devices are 3-D IC’s with the array of sensors in one layer and high-density Cache memory in another layer-both together forming a single circuit.

These future generation devices present a range of opportunities for semiconductor companies either in the development of sensors or the field of integration. Even software analytics plays a major role because of complex machine learning algorithm to extract the data.

Value of Big Data:

The percentage use of big data will become a key basis of competition among existing companies. It has become the most important factor of production in all the companies. It has the potential to create value and have implications for the companies like how it is organized and managed. It leads to higher productivity growth. These applications of big data can highly induce the semiconductor industry to design innovative chips to process these big data using modern techniques.

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