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Technology giant Hewlett-Packard’s enterprise services division announced the launch of business process outsourcing, or BPO, analytics services, designed to help organizations address the need for data-driven business insights, such as customer, supplier and market information by extracting data buried in employee emails, PowerPoint presentations, Webcasts, instant messages and other unstructured data.
With the service, HP BPO professionals analyze structured and unstructured data to derive insights, facilitate decisions and define recommended actions for businesses, and focus on providing practical, day-to-day analytical requirements. The services also leverage HP’s suite of information management and analytics technology and applications offerings, a suite of services to architect end-to-end information strategies for management, governance, and analysis of data.
“Enterprises have made significant investments in technology to capture and store data; however, few have developed the talent, tools and processes needed to turn this big data into actionable insights,” Danila Meirlaen, HP’s vice president of business process outsourcing, said in a statement. “HP provides the hardware and software for firms to utilize big data, and is offering experienced analytics professionals to help clients structure and run a sustainable data-driven decision-making framework that drives competitive advantage.”
HP analytics professionals leverage technologies developed through HP Labs, the company’s central research arm, as well as software from Vertica and Autonomy, both HP companies. The approach starts with collecting relevant data, then determining the answers to what happened and why through analytic methodologies, tools and research. HP then delivers insights on why a result happened and uses predictive analytics to help clients determine what could happen.
The company offers full-service, industry-specific BPO solutions for functions, including finance, administration and customer-relationship management. For example, the CRM service provides the management and operation of contact centers whose agents handle inbound and outbound interactions with customers. Services are delivered through HP’s network of global on-shore, near-shore and offshore contact centers.
Small and midsize enterprises (SMEs) are waking up to the benefits big data can offer their business and are realizing the competitive advantage it can hold, according to an online poll of 154 C-suite executives at international companies, conducted by Harris Interactive on behalf of enterprise application software provider SAP. The survey suggested these businesses are moving faster than their larger competitors to leverage big data, although just 25 percent of respondents could agree on a similar definition of big data.
As businesses of all sizes continue to struggle to find a solution for dealing with the growing volume of information flowing into their databases, open data will be far more consequential for increasing revenue and business value, a recent report from IT research firm Gartner indicated. Open data, according to the firm, refers to the idea that certain data should be freely available to everyone to use and republish as they wish, without restrictions from copyright, patents or other forms of control.