Business Intelligence – No Chance For Startups?

Ronald Coase once said: “Torture the data, and it will confess to anything.” Data is indeed a very powerful tool both in terms of business and personal affairs. Proper information provides useful insights and helps in smarter decision-making. All in all, who has the data has the power, right?

Yet, until very recently, corporate data analysis was usually left to a small group of analysts, R&D, and IT professionals. Should other employees want to do something with corporate data, it would necessarily have to go through these gatekeepers of information. However, the way analytics is done in organizations is being restructured. The new way of tackling business data emerged – Business intelligence.

What is Business Intelligence?

In essence, Business intelligence (or simply BI) comprises of strategies and technologies used by enterprises for business data analysis. Although quite new, the market has attracted a lot of promising players – the sector has over 6 thousand startups that provide solutions for effective data management. There are several unicorns (privately held companies valued at over $1 billion) and over 30 public companies – Valuenex, Affle, and Health Catalyst just to name a few.

Despite there is such a vast number of players at the BI startup scene, many entrepreneurs consider Business intelligence to be too sophisticated an industry for their entering the market. They believe that having professional data scientists, considerable experience in working with data, and extraordinary tech skills are mandatory. However, it shouldn’t be like that.

Our Vision

At Idealogic, we believe that Business intelligence shouldn’t be considered as something intricate and overcomplicated. BI, in fact, is every product that allows enhancing and optimizing corporate data management. BI tools provide historical, current, and predictive views of organizational operations and may include various methods such as data collection, scraping, parsers, and analytical models. BI technologies help with handling large amounts of both structured and unstructured data in order for businessmen to interpret corporate information with ease.

We believe that no matter how many players are already at the market, it can never be oversaturated with great innovative ideas. So if one has an interesting concept that may help businesses tackle data, he shouldn’t be afraid of entering the market – there is always a niche for a good idea!

Practical Case

Let’s consider one of our client’s case. FMCG e-commerce is developing at a rapid pace (especially now when quarantined people can barely use offline stores), and in 2021, over 2 billion people worldwide are expected to buy goods and services online. The market is very large and promising, and while there are various tools assisting e-commerce processes, our client came up with the idea of an efficient analytics tool for analyzing online sales of food and food-related products. The idea was to help both distributors and producers understand trends in demand for certain products and, therefore, optimize their sales.

The main idea is to compare pictures of the sales data from an online store received by a manufacturer and the real presence of each specific SKU on a particular page, understand if the product promotion gives the desired result, how the competitors’ goods are presented, and many other insights that are hidden from sales analysts. The combination of sophisticated web parsers, data mapping algorithms, and an optimized cloud environment allows our client to serve dozens of food producers across the European Union.

Summing up

Markets with big players may be intimidating, but they shouldn’t. If you have a good innovative idea, nothing should lead you astray. At Idealogic, we are always ready to help aspiring entrepreneurs in realizing their ideas by taking care of the future product on each stage: from UI/UX design and requirement specifications to supporting the developed MVPs. Business intelligence is a promising market that attracts a lot of interest from investors and businesses themselves. And who knows, maybe it is your idea that will disrupt the market, attract millions of dollars in investments, and help businesses with data management all over the world?

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