This vision for future market growth was delivered by Bill Parnell, president and CEO of Datalogic, which offers solutions with fixed position retail scanners, handheld scanners and mobile computers.

"The objective in analyzing extremely large and diverse types of data is to uncover correlations and patterns, aiding fast decisions and improved business results. Business analytics focuses on why events are happening, what will happen next, and how to optimize the enterprise's future actions," said Parnell.

In the retail industry, for example, he sees the need for advanced data analytics being driven by a variety of applications which guide decision-making. Example applications include price and promotion optimization, store site selections using census data sets and satellite imagery, or in-store and online shopper behavior by tracking shopping patterns and purchases. If relationships between large and unrelated data sets are analyzed, new insights can be used to tune existing and future strategies to yield significant results improvement.

In terms of "big data", the data volumes are huge. Wal-Mart is one example where data collected and used to drive business analytics exceeds 2.5 petabytes. The data contained in about 1 million customer transactions is being collected every hour. Parnell stressed the need for new data collection solutions to intelligently collect the large volume and variety of data in these complex transactional environments.

The future of automatic data collection is going far beyond simply scanning barcodes. For instance, advanced high-performance imaging technology reads barcodes but also provides images that are the basis for item recognition systems using visual pattern recognition software. He also stated that benefits from business analytics are being seen in many other industries such as government, healthcare, and logistics while also serving as a catalyst to the development of more complex and higher performing data collection systems.

The end goal is to manage "big data" for better business and improved customer satisfaction. Next-generation advanced data collection devices, such as those from Datalogic, are crucial in providing the fuel for these analytical decision-support systems.

Source: Datalogic