Thursday, April 23, 2015

Analytics Solution – Will You Build or Opt for 3rd Party?



Now, you have decided that you want to provide a predictive analytics power to your end-users. You want to embed the analytics part in your product and surprise your customers in your next product version release. Assuming that the next product version release has to be done within next 3 months, what you do? Which optimum strategy you will follow?

Building a predictive analytics solution from scratch customized to your product is a good idea. However, it takes lot of time; as a rough estimate, it will take nearly 6 months to build, test, and up a rudimentary analytics solution. Besides, you need to put lot of resources on work, which distracts them from their core task. Again, the TCO also increases if you calculate the upfront development costs, testing efforts, bug fixing iterations, etc. Again, you need to create documentation for which you need to employ a technical writing team, which is nothing but an additional cost burden.

The ridiculous point is that even though you do all this stuff, you cannot sell this analytics solution immediately to your end-customers; because, either they are new to the analytical solution concept or they are yet to realize the benefits of an analytical solution. In other words, most of them don’t know what sort of value addition it provides to them.

Now, what is the game plan? You competitors are doing their level best to implement cutting-edge marketing strategies to push you out of the market. Here, your customers are not in a position to appreciate the innovative efforts that you want to provide them. Unless, you introduce and evangelize about analytics solution that you want to embed in your existing product, most of them don’t even think about that; not even in their dreams.

In this kind of scenario, the best solution is to opt for 3rd party off-the-shelf (OTS) predictive analytics solution. Following this strategy, you can win many points compared to your competitors and delight your customers in a single shot. Not only is this strategy cost-effective, but also a risk-free one. When it comes to customizing analytics solution for your product, the 3rd party needs to worry; but not you. All you have to do is to point out wherever you want customization and the fixes will be done by the 3rd party without you getting drowned in sweat.

You and your team can still focus on your core competencies. The 3rd party takes the responsibility to train your customers, if needed. You don’t have to worry about the release and maintenance costs as you pay only a paltry license fees to the 3rd party to use their product. Since you are opting for a 3rd party analytics solution and it is already available in the market, it won’t take more than 1 month to integrate the analytics solution with your product and make it UP.

In summary, by opting for a 3rd party analytics solution, you can accelerate your next product version’s [embedded with latest analytics solution] time-to-market without increasing the TCO of your product.

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