How to qualify a suitable big data partner.

Companies leverage Big data and analytics for decision support outperform others. Today, it is a known fact. For leveraging big data and analytics, companies started looking for right vendors. Almost all companies investing a large amount of their budgets to leverage big data. According to a report of Industrial Internet Insights Report For 2015 , 73% of companies are investing more than 20% of their overall technology budget and 20% of companies are investing more than 30% of their budget only on big data. 76% of executives expect spending levels to increase in upcoming years.

Small and medium size companies outsource their big data and analytics operations to vendors because most of them don’t have internal capability to analyse those data. To qualify as a suitable big data partner companies look some specific strength in vendors. Because if the vendor is not capable enough to leverage big data then companies investment will go in vain specially their time. So companies need to be very careful while choosing a big data partner. Let’s discuss some point which is necessary to be in your big data partner.

Skilled and Experienced employees– This could be one of the most critical part of qualification. Check whether the vendor team consists right experienced big data and analytics professionals on-board. To get benefits and expected results from the huge amount of data, skilled employees are mandatory. Vendors should have enough number of skilled developer and analyst to process your data.

Big data lab – A big data vendor should have a big data lab for processing data. Without a big data lab set up they can’t process the data. Essentially it is a platform to process the data wherein all Hadoop related inbuilt/installed tools and technology is readily available.

Advance analytics capability demonstrated – Advance analytics is the collection of different analytic tools. These tools are necessary to analyse big data. Big data analytics need different tools and technologies to analyse.

Relevant case study and their impact– Case studies of a vendor show about their capability on what they had done in the past. Are they capable enough to handle your data? How much their output will impact your business? These questions can be answered only after going through their case studies. It will also show the dollar impact on their clients’ business.

Start small– If you are selecting a vendor as a big data partner then start with a small (POC – Proof Of Concept). After satisfying with the output of the smaller part then go for all project otherwise you will be on relatively high risk.

Ground talk– Before selecting a big data partner talk to their clients about their experience with that vendor. Try to know about that vendor from different sources. It will help to find ground level information about them.

There are many big data vendors in the market to give their service to different clients but finding a right big data partner is really a tough call. If you choose a wrong vendor for your project then definitely your company will suffer a lot. On a survey by CMO Council and the Business Performance Innovation (BPI) over 300 executives of different company across the globe found that only 10 percent of management respondents accept that they were extremely good at recognizing, qualifying and securing their partners. So, while going to engage with a big data partner always keep above points in minds.