Big Data, No Cows
Not too long ago we suggested that the entire big data, business intelligence, predictive analytics movement had gotten more than a little over saturated ( see Sis, Boom, Bah! – December 2015). There were just too many providers chasing too few prospects. A set of conditions that usually leads to a single, certain inevitability…unrelenting vendor attrition. And just when you think that AI has hyped our way out of these circumstances along comes some Gartner research that suggests that may not be the case. In a LinkedIn post, Bill Scherzo, CTO of Dell EMC Services noted that while vendors can clearly see the value of these types of technologies, the vision isn’t nearly as clear when you look at this from the buyer’s perspective. To back that up he offered the following Gartner graphic.
Now when you consider the fact that buyers increasingly don’t appreciate the value in all this technology, it’s not surprising that they aren’t clamoring for more of it. In fact, the skepticism on the part of CEO’s when it comes the value of this type of investment is real and growing (see The Elephant in the Room Just Got a Little Bigger – May 2017). One has to wonder if the way these solutions are merchandised, huge up front investments in infrastructure, enormous piles of data consuming enormous amounts of storage and servers, unproven algorithms that make for unproven wildcatting and a host of dry holes, isn’t just more than a little out of kilter. All of the risks are borne by the buyer. And that buyer is shelling out very large sums for architecture when what they want to buy are insights (see The Next Cambrian Explosion – February 2016).
Maybe the take away here is that vendors are missing the point and selling the wrong value proposition. They need to merchandise the insights and not the architecture. If their solutions are so consummate then the vendors should assume more of the risk. If vendors are sincere about creating value for buyers they should, as a service, boil these oceans in situ, discover useful insights and on a royalty basis merchandise those insights back to the buyers. This will accomplish a couple of things. Engender confidence on the part of buyers that this stuff might really work and get sellers to put some money where only their mouths have been for far too long.
Graphic courtesy of Shutterstock.com and zcool.com.cn
