It’s sometimes easy to forget that, as far as most end users are concerned, analytics is merely a means to an end. As such, those users are generally a lot more interested in the path of least resistance when it comes to applying analytics.
With that issue firmly in mind, Adobe this week at the Digital Marketing Association 2013 conference updated Adobe Analytics, a service that allows users to analyze massive amounts of unstructured Big Data.
Nate Smith, product marketing manager at Adobe, says Adobe Analytics eliminates all the complexity associated with Big Data by exposing analytics applications as a service. As a result, organizations don’t have to invest in expensive data scientists to organize their data; they just load it into the Adobe Marketing Cloud.
Capabilities of Adobe Analytics include video metrics, conversion analysis, mobile analytics and real-time reporting. Smith says Adobe Analytics is really a natural extension of the Omniture web analytics tools that Adobe acquired back in 2009. The only thing that is different now is that Adobe is extending those analytics capabilities to Big Data environments that reside in a cloud computing platform managed by Adobe.
As marketers increasingly take charge of their own IT requirements, the issue they are running into is the cost of the infrastructure needed to store massive amounts of customer data. The Adobe Marketing Cloud now not only provides a place to store all that data but also to run the analytics applications that actually make all that data valuable.
Historically, of course, there has always been a lot of tension between chief marketing officers (CMOs) and CIOs. Adobe Analytics provides a mechanism through which organizations can essentially outsource Big Data analytics for the marketing department, which should more effectively serve the needs of the marketing organization while allowing the IT department to concentrate its limited resources elsewhere. After all, it’s not so much the data that matters as it is the analytics that ultimately improve the state of the business.
