Big Data and Cloud Computing on Retail: advantages and precautions
The way companies are crafting their business strategy is constantly changing, especially for the last twenty years, due to costumer’s new experience preferencies and substantial developments on technology. Moreover, most of the change that happened within the corporate ecosystem was data driven, making possible for companies to rapidly identify their priorities and take the most knowledge enlightened path.
How to Adapt
Mark J. Perry made a very insightful connexion between the relevancy of the top 500 Fortune’s companies during two decades: 1950 vs. 2010. The Michigan’s University professor noticed that only 12% of the most important enterprises during 1954 were still in business on 2014. The other portion, 88%, have either gone bankrupt, merged or fell off the Fortune’s 500 list [1]. However, is possible to recognize similar settings between companies that were in business then and are still great business share holders now. Some of the overlapping business alive: General Motors and International Business Machines Corporation (IBM).
- General Motors: Like most of the automobile companies stablished in the US, General Motors (GM) was founded in Detroit, Michigan during the late 1910’s. Besides selling gas fueled vehicles, GM has increased its investments on hybrid, all eletrical and self driven cars. On 2016, GM announced the acquisition of Cruise Automation a San Francisco based company that focus it’s efforts on developing adaptable kits for non-autonomous cars. The transaction value was not public, but Fortune contacted a very close source to the company that claimed the acquisition was at north of $1 billion between cash and GM shares [2].
- IBM: The company was founded in 1911 as consequence of a 4 business merge. Initially, it’s core business was sale and lease of commercial scales, industrial time recorders and tabulators and punched cards [3]. During it’s lifetime, IBM has constantly evolved showing leading behavior and incredible trend perception. Later, the company took position for holding the record of the most patents generated by business for 24 uninterrupted years. Some of these inventions: Personal Computer (PC), Floppy Disk, Magnetic Stripe Card and the automated teller machine (ATM) [4]. Since its quarter’s revenues started to go down once the hardware segment is beset by challenges, IBM it’s allocating its time on cloud computing and data storage. For the last three years, the company invested more than $ 3 billion on the Internet of Things (IoT) and acquired some cloud computing companies such as StrongLoop and Meteorix [5].
Final Impressions
Reviewing the strategies that both of these companies adopted during the last 60 years or more, it is intuitive what makes them leaders on their segments. The innovation and competence to adapt facing the changing markets made them giants on the automobile and technology fields. However it is important to stay alert, according to Steve Dening from the Forbes Magazine the life expectancy for the Fortune’s 500 companies is lowering due to the innovation and unpredictable environment.
[6]
[1] http://www.aei.org/publication/fortune-500-firms-in-1955-vs-2014-89-are-gone-and-were-all-better-off-because-of-that-dynamic-creative-destruction/
[2] http://fortune.com/2016/03/11/gm-buying-self-driving-tech-startup-for-more-than-1-billion/
[3] Belden, Thomas Graham; Belden, Marva Robins (1962). The Lengthening Shadow: The Life of Thomas J. Watson. Little, Brown and Co. pp. 89–93.
[4] “24 Years of IBM Patent Leadership”. IBM. 2017-01-11.
[5] http://www.tomsitpro.com/articles/ibm-cloud-hyrid-storage-watson,1-3158.html
[6] https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2011/11/19/peggy-noonan-on-steve-jobs-and-why-big-companies-die/#6e7c63c7cc3a
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3 comments on “Big Data and Cloud Computing on Retail: advantages and precautions”
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Currently Arthur is working as a Project Manager Officer (PMO) for the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) team at Lojas Quero-Quero. The retail company is controlled by the private equity fund Advent International.
Agree. Companies, left with no choice, but need to keep abreadst of the latest technology, and how they can utilise the technology to improve their product and services offerings, manufacturing and other work processes, in order to stay alive.
I would like to add a point that the tone of the top and corporate culture are important drivers in promoting and implementing technological advancement within large corporation.
Thanks for a wonderful analysis of the situation happening in the business world. I agree that a company with an innovative mind and culture is a cornerstone of the survival of the business. I also shows that a business requires more than daily operations. I am wondering about the possible challenges for retail business faced when they use cloud computing and big data. The important question is how businesses uses cloud computing and big data to lead to a correct direction and not to be misled by the seas of data.
Thanks for the comment. That is a great question, in fact many businesses ask themselves the exactly same thing. Big Data its a great tool for priorization because when we look at some of the america’s retail companies its clear that they have an insanely big amount of costumers. The extraction, storage and mining of costumer data helps businesses to identify which small fraction of costumers is responsible for a big fraction of the company’s revenue. Once organizations are able to work on this data, they can launch specific promotions and special treatment for the costumers that are more faithfull to the business.