Three Ways Analytics
Can Help: Respond,
Adapt, and Save
Understand how analytics and AI can
help move your business forward
Three ways analytics can help: respond, adapt, and save
Contents
Introduction..................................................................................................... 3
Respond............................................................................................................ 4
Reports and dashboards............................................................................................... 5
Business intelligence...................................................................................................... 5
Augmented intelligence................................................................................................ 6
Machine learning............................................................................................................ 6
Data science..................................................................................................................... 7
Adapt................................................................................................................. 8
The new analytics platform.......................................................................................... 9
Innovation and analytics............................................................................................. 10
Save................................................................................................................... 11
Cost effectiveness.......................................................................................................... 11
Benefits for your team.................................................................................................. 11
Recovery starts today.................................................................................. 12
Introduction COVID-19 has brought new economic challenges for companies
worldwide. As businesses adapt to different ways of working and
changes in customer behavior, they need data and clarity to plan
their next steps. Analytics can help them navigate the way forward.
Proven analytics technologies have a strong track record of enabling
more dynamic and exploratory responses that can guide businesses
through difficult times. Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics is one
such technology. With the benefit of years of analytics experience,
Microsoft is ready to deliver the next generation of insight,
immediacy, and power at a time when you need it most.
Analytics enable you to respond intelligently and effectively,
adapt to the current business landscape, and save on costs.
3
Respond
Business intelligence and analytics, in a form that executives can
understand and analyze, is crucial to your COVID-19 response.
Dashboards and visualizations that worked for your business in
the past, may now be a source of frustration for your C-suite. A
consequence of remote working is that executives who relied
on middle managers or business analysts for information and
updates must now engage with business data directly.
Your business can respond to this unprecedented situation
with the help of various analytics technologies:
Reports and dashboards Business intelligence Augmented intelligence Machine learning Data science
4
Reports and dashboards Business intelligence
Every business uses a range of reports that are updated daily, weekly, monthly, A significant data point in a dashboard signals the need to examine the data
quarterly, etc. Many are in a standard tabular format, typically to conform with further. Executives might need to go deeper into the information, or widen their
regulatory standards. Although these conventional views of your business view to make comparisons across departments or geographies. Dashboards can
provide a system of record, they are often insufficient for analysis. help, but they are better suited to responding to events that are anticipated and
can be planned for.
Dashboards, such as those you build with Power BI, can prove much more
useful, especially those that feature well-designed visualizations of the key With COVID-19, there is less socialization and interaction between employees.
metrics that your business needs to track. For example, an increase in order As a result, executives are waking up to just how little direct engagement they
processing time will probably be recorded in your reports, but executives could have with the data that drives their businesses. Self-service business intelligence
easily overlook it. A dashboard, however, can draw their attention to it with an tools like Power BI can empower executives to do at least some of their
appropriate chart, color, formatting, or even a pop-up alert or message. own analysis.
Dashboards can help executives monitor important aspects of your changing
business without requiring them to examine data in detail.
5
Augmented intelligence Machine learning
Even with self-service tools, you can’t expect executives to become expert Human beings and machine intelligence excel at quite different tasks. Machine
analysts overnight. However, there are ways you can bring expertise to them. learning can work at a scale and speed that makes it powerful for analyzing
One approach is called augmented intelligence. This type of analytics is not complicated processes, while humans live intuitive and empathetic lives,
a replacement for personal insight, but augmented intelligence can enhance developing the ability to understand complex problems. Data science may tell
your team’s human abilities to make, explore, and share discoveries. Power BI you all the complicated ways in which supply chains, production, and sales are
is a pioneer when it comes to bringing augmented intelligence into business impacted by COVID-19, but human insight, working with the same data, can
intelligence. Users can explore root cause analysis with smart visualizations, connect seemingly unrelated impacts. Your business can learn how market
or query data using natural language. sentiment, employee morale, and the challenges of working remotely will make
an impact, which will shape your response.
Another advance is automated machine learning, in which artificial intelligence
can assist data scientists and business users alike by building advanced analytic
models for them. Many businesses—especially those without a specialized
team—will find this an impactful first step toward the hot topic of data science.
6
Data science
Data science enables automated insight with a depth and scale
Data science Business analytics
beyond the abilities of human analysts. Advanced analytics
used to be under the domain of large enterprises, but today
even small businesses need scalable insight about their
online presence, e-commerce platforms, and social media Big data Relational data
interactions.
Experimentation Proven security & privacy
Data science differs from business intelligence in several AND
important ways. For example, a data scientist is mostly Fast exploration Dependable performance
concerned with running experiments to see what discoveries Semi-structured Structured
can be made using data. If the experiments yield interesting
results—perhaps a way of predicting successful products or
detecting patterns of fraud—the data scientist may simply
present their findings. But more often, they will put their
experimental model into production where the rules they Data lake Data warehouse
found in experiments will apply to millions of new transactions,
products, customers, and other real-time sources of data.
Another significant difference is that data scientists tend to
work with raw data rather than data that has been cleaned
and transformed for business needs. For example, a sales
dashboard probably includes data that has been integrated
and consolidated from multiple sources, removing duplicates
or abandoned transactions. But a data scientist may be
interested in raw data to find patterns and create processes Bring divided worlds together
that make future sales more efficient.
with a unified analytics service
7
Adapt
Adapting in an uncertain climate requires more than just hiring smart people and
giving them access to data; you also need an analytics platform that serves data
scientists, business intelligence users, and executives alike.
History has shown that during times of crisis, analytics platforms are launched
to new levels of importance.
1997 2007-8
Asian economic crisis Global financial crisis
1990 2000 2020
Oil price shock Recession and the dotcom crash COVID-19
Each recent, global economic event has marked a turning point in the use of analytics:
• The widespread recession following the oil price shock in 1990 saw data warehousing become a mainstream practice
for large enterprises.
• In response to the Asian economic crisis of 1997, the recession of 2000, and the dotcom crash, business intelligence
vendors evolved their products faster than ever before to provide new insights and help build a better future.
• The Global Financial Crisis of 2007-08 saw first-generation business intelligence companies overtaken by newly
dominant self-service technologies, including visualization and in-memory analytics.
8
The new analytics platform
Since the 1990s, the primary source of business insight has been the data warehouse. Often described as a single version of the
truth, the data warehouse integrates business data from many sources into a single enterprise model, which describes how the
various aspects of the business should relate to each other and interact. A lot of work needs to go into designing the model and
loading the data regularly to keep it updated. Today, the data warehouse remains unmatched in its ability to deliver consistent,
well-governed data for reports and dashboards.
However, your business may have numerous temporary, external, or ad-hoc data sets that are unlikely to be consolidated in the
data warehouse. Business intelligence models will provide more help in these cases—for example, planning and monitoring a
specific campaign or modeling a short-term project budget.
Let’s not forget big data. For the traditional data warehouse professional, the biggest change in data architecture has been the
growing maturity of the data lake as an enterprise data store. Data in the lake remains in its raw state, which, as we discussed
earlier, is critical for data science.
Tech-smart business users have fresh and innovative ideas they need to explore with agility. The process of building centralized
models to support all these initiatives often proves too cumbersome. Azure Synapse uniquely brings all these capabilities together
with common security, shared governance, integrated performance management, and a single administration console.
9
Azure Synapse Analytics
Unified experience
On-premises data
Azure Synapse Studio
Integration Management Monitoring Security
Cloud data Azure Machine
Learning
Analytics runtimes
SQL
SaaS data Power BI
Azure Data Lake Storage
Streaming data
Innovation and analytics
It’s one thing to produce analytics better than before. It’s quite another to produce analytics in new ways.
Whether using natural language, augmented intelligence, or automated ML, Azure Synapse and Power BI enable a new
community of business users to explore and discover data, all with excellent security and governance.
In the modern enterprise, innovation emerges more from the collaboration of a diverse team, than from a lonely genius in the lab.
To collaborate effectively across a diverse team, you need to support many different users and use cases with consistent, well-
governed data. For example, data scientists tend to write scripts in Python or Scala, while database developers work in SQL. BI
users leverage Power BI DAX expressions and Excel.
Having all your analytics resources integrated, secured, and delivered in the cloud, with global support, enables highly distributed
teams to collaborate synchronously or asynchronously on complex and large-scale problems. With the Microsoft Teams
integration, all the key conversations, workgroup threads, and live meetings occur all in one place, driven by your data.
10
Save
As you adapt to new ways of working, costs may be at the forefront
of your considerations. Azure Synapse offers unlimited analytics on Price-performance | Lower is better
a limited budget—enabling you to save. The storage, computing
power, and resources you need are available seamlessly as you
$600
94% less
add more data, perform more complex analyses, and build an
$500
organization driven by business intelligence and insight.
$400
$300
$200
Cost effectiveness
$153
$100
According to research from GigaOm, Azure Synapse has the best price-performance ratio on $0
the market. Perhaps more importantly, the architecture doesn’t impose new costs if you need to Azure
Synapse
Analytics
react to unexpected scenarios like COVID-19.
Whether you’re running large-scale data warehouse queries with SQL, data science experiments
with Apache Spark, or complex data integrations and orchestrations, Azure Synapse enables you
to monitor and govern the resources being used. The architecture scales all these activities over
Price-performance | Lower is better Price-performance | Lower is better
shared data sets, but you don’t face the financial or operational cost of adding
new clusters. 94% less $600 $570
$500
Benefits for your team $400
$286
$309
$300
This advanced technology may sound daunting, but, in fact, you almost certainly have the skills $206
in-house today to set up and run Azure Synapse. Data scientists will find the Apache Spark $200
$153
environment not only familiar, but incredibly productive. Business intelligence users will benefit $100
from seamless integration with Power BI. And SQL administrators will recognize and appreciate
$0
the integrated management functions in Azure Synapse. Finally, best-in-class security is deeply Azure
Synapse
Google
BigQuery
Google
BigQuery
integrated with Azure Active Directory and network management. Analytics Flat Rate per byte
Manage your costs and save money with the flexibility of Azure Synapse.
* “GigaOm Analytics Field Test-H Benchmark Report” January 2019;
“GigaOm Analytics Field Test-DS Benchmark Report” April 2019
11
Recovery starts today
How do we limit the damage and start to recover?
Moving forward requires leadership, a clear vision,
and emotional intelligence, but it also requires an
analytical approach.
Power BI is an extraordinary resource that will support every decision maker in
your business as they engage directly with data. They can explore, report, and
communicate with a greater impact than ever before, whether they are tasked
with monitoring your business, investigating issues, developing innovative
insights, or building data-driven apps for collaboration.
The Azure Synapse platform supports Power BI users with unlimited data and
compute resources. Azure Synapse also delivers a continuum of analytics
that are relevant to everyone, from the operational business user to the most
strategic executive and most technical data scientist. Too often, the use cases
in your business may feel poles apart. Azure Synapse brings together all your
analytics scenarios for a comprehensive view of your data.
The way you respond, adapt, and save today defines your business strategy
for tomorrow. Azure Synapse can’t tell you how to manage your business, but
it can handle the complexity and scale of your analyses with speed, simplicity,
and economy.
Visit Azure Synapse Analytics to see how quickly and easily analytics can set
your business on the road to recovery from the impact of COVID-19. If you
have questions or need help, request a call from a sales specialist.
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