In layman terms - Analytics is all about correlating past and present data to give you some actionable data for today and tomorrow. Analytics is not new to business but overwhelming amount of data that could not be processed by traditional methods and tools is and that lead to a new field Big Data.
Hardware vendors like EMC, NetAPP, Dell, HP and others banked on the high processing and solid state memory requirements. Software vendors like SAP, SAS, Oracle and others rolled out a ton of proprietary database foundry with faster, better in-memory solutions and a barrage of presentation layer tools to play with. Ignorant to the above two pure analytics players who are 4 - 6 year old in the market have carved out a niche for themselves with Data Science as a Service. Mu Sigma, Opera, others..
In-between the muck are IT Vendors like IBM, Accenture.. who have the capability to bundle the hardware and software together in varying combinations but are missing the business insights to make a good use case.
A pitch like "value is in the speed at which we can perform the analytics,...." fall short in explaining what will companies do with that actionable data. The majority of small and medium business are still struggling to understand how Big Data will create opportunities, wondering if that pile of data is even useful and if its enough?
IT Vendors will have to think long and hard on how to approach this problem, to quell the hype and invest in showcasing how analytics matter today, rather than waiting for the current sandbox usecases to matter.
