Intelligent CIO Middle East Issue 58 | Page 40

FEATURE: ANALYTICS Predictive analytics can help your organisation forecast future outcomes based on historical data and analytics techniques such as Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence. What is driving the surge in predictive analytics tools in the Middle East? Industry pundits share insights with Intelligent CIO Middle East on what’s driving analytics everywhere. Analytics or predictive analytics is a category of data analytics aimed at making predictions about future outcomes based on historical data and analytics techniques such as statistical modelling and Machine Learning. The science of predictive analytics can generate future insights with a significant degree of precision. With the help of sophisticated predictive analytics tools and models, any organisation in the Middle East can now use past and current data to reliably forecast trends and behaviours milliseconds, days or years into the future. According to MarketResearch.com, the Middle East Big Data, business intelligence and analytics market is projected to grow from US$5.09 billion in 2015 to US$12.38 billion by 2020 growing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 19.4%. The regional trend proves that both the government and the private sector are currently depending on numerous emerging IT technologies and solutions, such as Big Data, business intelligence and analytics to support infrastructural developments, improve healthcare services, efficiently manage available natural resources, and mitigate risks and disasters. Ahmad Dorra, Customer Engagement Solutions Sales Leader – Middle East, Africa and Turkey, Avaya, said analytics plays an essential role in everything that organisations, of any kind, do. “It enables them to measure how their business is doing today, identify areas of enhancement related to their products, services and employees, as well as forecast what their customers will demand in the future. For example, when launching a new strategy or vision for the future, analytics helps businesses to understand their market and what their customers are looking for through social media or by analysing the feedback customers leave during their interactions with call centres,” he said. Feras Juma, IoT and Integration Solutions Manager, Software AG, said analytics across the whole spectrum (visual, streaming and predictive) has become a core requirement that the market is seeing many customer requests in 2020. “Unified visibility, industrial real time monitoring and visualisation, predictive maintenance, anomaly detection are all few examples of use cases we have received which reflect the increasing demand and Insight everywhere: Analytics mature 40 INTELLIGENTCIO www.intelligentcio.com