Cisco Links Innovation to Analytics Automation

The keys to innovation in big data include increased automation in analytics and emerging markets with young, tech-savvy populations that are moving toward urban areas like that of India’s. Such is the opinion of Cisco’s Chief Globalization Officer, Wim Elfrink.

Institutions are putting a lot of resources into finding analytics solutions, solutions that will automate a process that Elfrink feels is necessary to be automated. “Analytics will be the new key enabler of new services. Analytics in itself are not that creative because it’s analyzing data so that you can make better choices.”

What Elfrink is saying here is not that the creative juices are being wasted on figuring out how to make big data analytics work, but that they will be put to better use once that happens. The potential business applications of analytics are practical and exciting, but they obviously cannot happen until the nitty-gritty aspects of said analytics are completed.

Elfrink also notes that a key in innovation lies in young, fledgling markets, where the adjective young denotes ‘persons not of age’ as opposed to new. “In Asia,” Elfrink says, “700 million people will be urbanized. India is still getting younger, and a lot of young people will drive a lot of innovation.” A younger population generally denotes a developing area. But if that younger population is moving away from the rural farmland and toward the more technologically advanced large cities, that could indeed drive innovation.

This is an important distinction to make. Several countries around the world, especially in Africa, are seeing their populations get younger but yet continue to be largely agriculturally dependent. That is not a recipe for innovation. India, being relatively new players to high performance computing, can bring a fresh perspective as their populace figures out the big data world without existing, potentially stunting, pre-conceived notions.

However, Japan and several Western European nations (especially those not named France or Germany) are experiencing negative population growth and static urbanization patterns. Yet they should not be discounted as drivers of innovation. Elfrink, who knows what he is talking about as his company’s globalization executive, likely does not mean to do so but his statements could be interpreted as such.

Either way, Elfrink’s points that big data innovation will come with increased analytic automation and a young, urban population base are solid.

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