Why Unused Data is a Virtual Goldmine
Doug Bannister
December 8, 2017
Every single customer interaction, sales transaction, operations report, and similar electronic record represents a wealth of potentially valuable information that can be used to shape business strategy, enhance customer experience and improve product design. Yet, a vast portion of this data sits unused. The critical last mile between this information and its application represents a massive area of business opportunity.
According to McKinsey and Company, typical business servers and enterprise data centers only deliver between five to fifteen percent of their maximum computing output on average over the course of a year.[1] Gartner also reports that nearly 97% of data sits unused in organizations. The time and effort to acquire, secure, and store this information is significant, but the underlying cost of failing to utilize this information is massive.
The Uptime Institute found that nearly 30% of servers worldwide sit unused.[2] The cost of these 10 million comatose servers is somewhere in the neighborhood of nearly $30 billion dollars in idle capital. At the same time 90% of Dark Data, or unstructured data, is never analyzed. This means that valuable insights about products, internal development processes, and even website analytics that are collected during the course of normal business sit unused. The untapped value stored in customer information, log files, account information, and even legacy documents is astronomical.
The chances that your organization is sitting on a pile of valuable and untapped data is extremely high. Dark data represents a chance for companies to leverage unique and important insights that can drive their business and allow them to compete with, or remain, market leaders. For example, mobile geo-location data can be used to coordinate logistics and user behavior in completely novel ways.
The growth of organizations like Amazon are great case studies into just how much new data is being created in today’s technological society and businesses can leverage that data. People are leaving millions of footprints in metadata that can be mined for profitable strategies and the most successful organizations will be the ones who figure out how to do this the fastest.
Omnivex allows businesses to easily collect, process, and deliver targeted real-time information across your organization on any screen – connecting people and data.
CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER & CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER
Doug is Chief Executive Officer and Chief Technology Officer of Omnivex Corporation.
Doug is considered by many as a visionary in the digital signage space. In his role as CEO and CTO Doug is responsible for the long term product architecture and the overall vision for the company. He has always maintained direct responsibility for the architecture of the software to ensure the product remains at the forefront of the industry. Combined with his vision, leadership and experience as an entrepreneur in the LED sign market, Doug has used his understanding of customer requirements and knowledge of technology to create one of the leading software solutions for the digital signage industry.