Big data is only so much noise if you don't do anything with it. And with many people speculating about the looming lack of data scientists, the time might be right to go into that field. Which is what Think Big Analytics has done, now with the help of US$ 3 million in funding for its Big Data consultancy firm.

Why Big Data?

The potential of big data to drive marketing strategies is established. More and more companies are seeing the benefits, but not everyone knows how to extract value from the data.

According to Rick Farnell, Co-founder and president of Think Big Analytics, the growth of data is outpacing the growth in requisite skills and products to harness the data, causing problems for many.

"The pace at which we are adding data and connected devices like mobile phones, tablets, smart TVs, connected vehicles and any device or machine that connects home via the internet is growing at an unprecedented pace,” he says. “The pace at which the data is expanding and changing and the opportunity to create new data partnerships cannot be harnessed with brittle systems not built or designed for this new world. Business change in our old world is costly, time consuming and extremely difficult.”

This is where software and solution providers come in, as enterprises look for solutions to translate the collected data into actionable insights. And vendors are rushing to meet the need. For example, Attunity recently updated its RepliWeb for Enterprise File Replication product and IBM bought StoredIQ to improve their big data offerings.

Enter Think Big Analytics

Then there is Think Big Analytics. The three year old company is offering something a little different from the typical software solutions: humans. The company is betting on its consultants to provide the knowledge clients need to move through all of the requisite steps of turning raw data into marketing insights.

The company's approach is broken into three stages: Imagine, Illuminate and Implement. In other words, planning, training and, well, implementation. Working on the premise that people learn by doing, the company engages with clients in short objective driven projects, introducing vendor solutions, providing technical training and quick test stages to reach fast, measurable results. 

Each member of the team Farnell has an average of 20 plus years in the industry. We will see if a consultant only big data company pays off, but it could be seen as a shrewd move considering the frequent reports of shortages of data scientists.

The Investment Funding

As for the Think Big funding, which was lead by the WI Harper Group and Angel Investor Daniel Scheinman, the money will be used to develop “big data as a service” tools, which combine data science and data engineering to help marketers make better marketing decisions.

The company finds that by combining data science with engineering and open source information platforms, they will be give marketers and their companies the tools needed to not only understand and utilize the information that big data provides, but expand their company’s brand and improve their overall marketing platform.