Published on the 22/04/2015 | Written by Beverley Head

Data feeds from mobiles, wearables and IoT devices promise marketers rich new streams of information that can be mined for marketing insights…

Data from mobiles and IoT devices is delivering top line benefits for early adopters according to Jack Norris, chief marketing officer of MapR, which sells Apache Hadoop solutions and services internationally.

Norris, in Australia to participate in the Connect Expo in Melbourne, said that companies were using the insights to improve products and services, get better understanding of customer needs, and develop whole new classes of products and services.

This week MapR announced the integration of its platform with Teradata’s QueryGrid which allows big data analytics across multiple data sets with a single query.

But when Norris asked for a show of hands from his Melbourne audience this week about how many were planning to deploy Hadoop solutions, Australia put on a pretty limp performance.

Norris told iStart that when he asked a similar question in the US recently 60 percent of the audience raised their hands – in Australia this week the proportion was a much lower 10 percent.

“It’s not very scientific but it shows the bifurcation between those who are well on their way,” and those who aren’t, said Norris.

And those that aren’t could be missing out on new revenues he said. Norris said that a survey of MapR customers conducted four months ago found that the majority of customers reported a return on investment in big data analytics in under 12 months, with a quarter of the survey respondents reporting they achieved benefits of 25 times their investment.

He said that a large credit card company had been able to use Hadoop to analyse mobile customer data and use insights from that to distribute merchant coupons, thus driving greater use of its credit cards. Norris agreed that the offers had to be well targeted as “no one likes to be barraged by spam, but they do like to be told of something they are interested in,” which was only possible if enterprise had access to and leveraged more customer data.

Internationally MapR’s technology underpins BeatsMusic which analyses customer preferences and then uses insights from across its network to make further recommendations to customers. Locally Quantium and Media Hub are named MapR users.

“This is marketing in the truest sense to target, satisfy and surprise the customer,” said Norris.