We’re excited to be in the curl of the big data wave and helping our clients maximize their data assets this year. Our team is really grooved into what’s the best and highest use of a data analyst’s skills, talent and time and then where and how we can deliver the biggest ROI for your ETL Plus and custom apps development investment dollars.

Take a look at these and be sure to work them into your CIO inbox!

1. The number of options for “preparing” end users to discover all forms of data grows.

Self-service data preparation tools are exploding in popularity. This is in part due to the shift toward business-user-generated data discovery tools such as Tableau that reduce time to analyze data. Business users now want to also want to be able to reduce the time and complexity of preparing data for analysis, something that is especially important in the world of big data when dealing with a variety of data types and formats. We’ve seen a host of innovation in this space from companies focused on end user data preparation for Big Data such as Alteryx, Trifacta, Paxata and Lavastorm while even seeing long established ETL leaders such as Informatica with their Rev product make heavy investments here.

2. The buzzwords converge! IoT, Cloud and Big Data come together

The technology is still in its early days, but the data from devices in the Internet of Things will become one of the “killer apps” for the cloud and a driver of petabyte scale data explosion. For this reason, we see leading cloud and data companies such as Google, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft bringing Internet of Things services to life where the data can move seamlessly to their cloud based analytics engines.

Though these two changes and trends may seem disparate, they’re linked by the need to work with data quickly and conveniently. As Big Data changes and new ways of working with that data pop up, the details shift, but the song remains the same: everyone’s a data analyst, and there’s never been a more exciting job.