Partners poised to fill Big Data skills gap

IBM survey reveals change in the market that providers should act on

Few things spell opportunity for the channel like the gap between what businesses want and what they feel they're capable of doing. Such has always been the case with Big Data and business analytics, but there's new evidence that both the skills gap and the partner potential may be growing.

That's good news for providers with established Big Data practices as well as for those that have been on the sidelines waiting for things to shake out a little.

Demand for Big Data services is growing, though success will favour those who approach the market with solutions for real problems over those with technology packages in search of a question to answer.

In the area of finance, for example, a recent poll of CFOs finds 82 per cent of these executives expressing the desire to engage in what they see as valuable enterprise-wide data integration, according to researchers at IBM. Only 24 per cent of them, however, feel that their current technology teams are up to the task.

The findings represent a 205 per cent increase in the gap between the importance of integrating data and the ability to exploit it since IBM first asked the question in 2005. In fact, technology is the third most important business factor to the CFOs after macro-economic and market factors. Technology was only in fifth place as recently as 2010, according to IBM data.

"In our discussions with CFOs over the past decade, the significance of technology and analytical tools in transforming the finance function and broader enterprise has continuously risen," said Bill Fuessler, a partner in IBM's Global Business Services.

"Data has always sat in the center of a CFO's job responsibilities, and CFOs now recognise how insights from Big Data are helping their company become more competitive."

That attitude is a big reason behind the predictions of IDC and other that the Big Data technology and services market will top $32bn (£19bn) by 2017, growing at nearly 30 per cent annually -- well above the rate of growth for the IT market at large.

When IT decision makers covet a technology for its ability to help them improve their business performance but lack sufficient internal skills to make it happen, they turn to third-party providers to fill the gap.

In the case of Big Data and business analytics, however, the spoils will largely go to those prepared to make a strong business case for their services.

Partners need to be less about the technology and more about what the technology delivers in order to get on the radar of the CFOs like those polled by IBM.

Often this involves using a partner's specialised knowledge of a vertical in a unique way. Clients will want to know what their peers are doing to gain insight from their data sets, something vertically focused partners will have particular visibility of.

Only then does the conversation turn to the technologies that enable such analytics and intelligence. The goal for partners is clear: Give the IT decision makers what they cannot achieve internally, and do it in a way that improves their business and assures their personal and professional success.

As the IBM research points out, CFOs who manage to integrate and analyze internal and external data are some 70 per cent more effective than peers who rely on traditional internal spreadsheets.

As Cordell Sweeney, CFO at Pabst Brewing, told the IBM researchers: "Leveraging analytics has enabled us to change the conversation and become value-added partners, using business insights to drive decisions that lead to gaining market share, increasing profitability, and creating value for our shareholders.

"We have transformed our finance function to move away from the proverbial thousand spreadsheet march, now using an analytics platform to completely shift the workloads of the finance team toward higher value activities."

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