Why Business Analytics

According to Gartner, the modern business intelligence market in India is expected to grow by 30 percent and data analytics platforms by 19 percent in 2018. Modern technology produces a vast amount of information that provides businesses an opportunity to understand customer preferences better, leading to more choices for customer acquisition. Virginia Tech’s new Postgraduate Program in Business Analytics, leading to a certificate, prepares students to better meet societal, economic, and technology demands. Preparing for today’s market requires skills in big data technologies, advanced statistics, machine learning, data security, cloud application development, and innovative thinking.

According to research from the International Data Corporation (IDC), data will grow at a compound rate of 42 percent through 2020. That is exponential growth. As repeatable tasks are replaced with robotics and more evolved tasks with artificial intelligence, the job market shows tremendous potential. According to Forbes, in the US, jobs requiring machine-learning skills pay an average of $114,000. Advertised data scientist jobs pay an average of $105,000, and advertised data engineering jobs pay an average of $117,000. The number of openings in data analytics is expected to be 2.7 million by 2020, and a large number of these jobs will be in the finance and insurance industry. Global demand for trained data scientists is increasing.

With more time spent on smart devices and increased interaction with search engines, social media, and news feeds, the nature of data continues to evolve with a degree of anarchy. Unstructured data is growing significantly faster than data in rows and columns.  Add to this mix Internet of Things (IoT) and you begin to see that the volume, velocity, and variety of data require thinking within a completely new paradigm.