When you can get three succesful corporate leaders on stage to talk at a technology conference, what do you ask them about? Corporate culture, the economy and business leadership, sure - but most importantly, you talk about technology. Specifically, what technologies should businesses be taking advantage of today? Mobile, social media, customer analytics and high-performance analytics top the list, according to Orland Magic President Alex Martins, Belk Chairman and CEO Tim Belk and SAS CEO Jim Goodnight.
Alex Martins says social media has become a big part of the Orlando Magic's operation because that's where the conversations are happening. "People are out there talking aboutt and interacting with your products in an immediate way that they never have before." Orland magic has the third highest amount of Twitter followers of any professional sports teams (right behind the LA Lakers, Manchester United). "We need to utilize those mediums ot stay relevant, to interact with fans on a more immediate basis and drive offers."
Facebook is just as important as Twitter, says Martins. "We are using both mediums equally. We utilize twitter for late-breaking news, but you have to utiilize both AND other social mediums." Twitter and Facebook are the social channels of today, but you have to be prepared for other mediums that come down the road, encourages Martins. "You have to communicate with all of our fans in whatever medium they're communicating in. It truly is about listening as well as communicating."
Tim Belk says the biggest trend he's seeing in technology is reflected in the different growth rates across different parts of the business. While revenues for brick and mortar are growing four to five percent, the e-commerce growth rate is doubling. These leads to a number of technology questions, says Belk.
"If we look five years out, where do we think that will go and how will we support that? And how will mobile effect that? And how will FaceBook intersect with that and allow us to connect with our customers? It's hard to have the answer, so it ties in with the themes of the conference. You have to place a number of bets and be willing to let a number of those fail but let those that succeed point you in the right direction." Most importantly, says Belk, "If you can stay focused on your customer and your associate, and manage those transitions efficiently, that will help your business succeed.
Martins also suggests using analytics to better understand customers. "Customization in our business is becoming a huge element of being successful. We can't be same thing to everyone. We have to customize the experience for the individual fan, pinpoint specific offers and specific conversations with that fan." For example, he says analytics can help you distinguish true diehard basketball fans from those who come to games more for the social experience - and tailor offers accordingly.
"The whole area of high performance computing is a strong focus for SAS right now," says Jim Goodnight. "We have taken just about every statistical modeling routine and operations research procedure and moved these into massively parallel mode. So modelling jobs that used to take eight to nine hours can now be done in 20-30 seconds." The change that's going to happen for businesses as a result, is enormous, according to Goodnight. " Once we get it in memory, things like logistic regression can take eight to nine passes of data, all in I/O memory, using all cores available on every single server. You can end up with 24 threads of processes on every server, and you could have 100 servers. The speed is phenomenal."
Using Teradata database as an example Goodnight describes the structure: "Instead of all the data being stored in single disc files, it's spread out. So, every processor has a part of the data. What we like to do is move SAS out to those individual nodes and analye data just on that node and pull that back together. The shared nothing distribution database is something we really like about Teradata."
Goodnight also discussed the trends of using of cloud computing behind the firewall and using text analytics to analyze social media data. In conclusion, he said, "You have to think of all your data as a startegic asset. Don't let that asset go to waste. Use it to model, predict and understand your business better."
