Arrow finds out how happy London is in bid to help partners

"We want to shed our distributor skin and start to become more of a technology partner," says Arrow

Arrow has launched a big data project to find out how happy London is in a bid to help channel partners explain the technology to their customers.

Every day, the How Happy is London project analyses around 2.4 billion data points from around London, including from Transport for London, the Met Office, Twitter and stock exchanges, in order to gauge how happy Londoners are on that day.

The project is an attempt to make it easier for the distie's channel partners to show their customers how big data can be valuable to their businesses.

David Fearne, technical director at Arrow ECS, said that the project is an effort to show partners that it is more than a just a distributor.

"We want to shed our distributor skin and start to become more of a technology partner," he explained. "As well as still having our distribution capabilities at the heart of everything we do. We have done a few different activities to really try to differentiate ourselves and one of those things was analytics. The fundamental point of the project is to help our channel better address the challenges that surround the understanding of what exactly big data is."

The project has a free application programming interface (API), and Fearne hopes that partners will take the project and alter it to show its customers what it could get out of big data, with examples including a project to show how happy a workforce is.

He said: "It's part of Arrow's way of revaluating value. Value isn't in technical services or showing your services in flashing lights. It is about bringing the topic to life and bringing it into the context of what your customers are talking about.

"The competitive edge in our industry is getting smaller and smaller every day. Making decisions that aren't backed up by quality, quantifiable data is actually pretty stupid. Making decisions about your business and what you invest on based on sales or just customer satisfaction [and so on] is a bit silly. You need to understand the company as a whole."