I attended the Informatica customer data seminar in London recently. It was well attended and informative. My take on the main messages is below, although much more was said about specific functionality. If anyone wants more detail on particular points please either comment on the blog or drop us a line: [email protected] .
Informatica’s key note presentation focused on the growth of “big data”, in particular interaction data (data from social media and internet interaction) and how in the last few years this has grown from nothing to overtake transactional data volumes. The main messages were around “social connectivity”, with particular mention of Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. It is here that many companies in the data market are focusing and the message was that Informatica is no exception.
As something of a social media luddite myself, particularly when it comes to Tweeting, the penetration of Twitter hit home to me last week when I was reading a letter in the Economist (7th-13th May, page 18) from the Chinese Embassy in London which referenced comments made via Twitter. If use by Chinese officials doesn’t make Twitter mainstream then I don’t know what does.
The big thing we at Red Olive are seeing social media data used for is to add currency and relevancy as context to shade the picture being built up about individuals, particularly by business-to-consumer businesses. The forward-looking ones are starting to incorporate sentiments expressed on Facebook into their single customer view, for example. I think that’s probably worthy of a blog posting of its own.
Jefferson
