Targeting Business Customers vs Consumers
Indix, a start up company that is now split on two continents, just recently got $4.5 billion in financing in order to work towards their goal of tools to give business managers based on big data. The companys CEO, Sanjay Parthasarathy, just recently moved from India back to Washington to expand the marketing, sales, and customer service center, leaving the research and development center in India. The small, 35 person, firm is doing big things however, despite its size and new split between continents.
Indix is building a dataset with information on different products, their prices, and certain events that affect those prices. At this moment, they have over one billion prices and lots of products and are aiming for more. What do they want to do with all this data? The interesting thing about Indix is that they are focusing on the business customer side instead of the consumers. Why? Parthasarathy says that its very interesting looking at the events along the supply chain that affect the prices of the product. He likes to think of what businesses will be capable of if the managers are equipped with the information that Indix is currently compiling and analyzing.
Their goal is to build a platform and a set of tools that will enable both internal and external collaboration within businesses. They want the managers to be able to use the information, analytics and visualizations, suggestions, and many other tools created by Indix to improve their business, mostly to set the most profitable price. What is interesting to me about this is that I havent seen a lot about this before. Indix seems like a pretty unique company with a unique goal. Ive seen a lot about Target and Netflix using the analysis of Big Data to determine what their customers want. But what about ways to improve their business model or supply chain?
This seems to be a place where IEs can truly come in and shine. Yes, what the consumers want from a store or company is very important and meaningful to us. However, were trained to improve systems and businesses. This is what Indix is trying to do with their massive dataset. Maybe this is something that we should also be focusing more on as IEs as Big Data is becoming more popular.
Source:
http://www.xconomy.com/seattle/2013/04/15/a-billion-prices-and-counting-big-data-ambition-at-startup-indix/
download file now
