Of course you do. Everyone does. Even your iTunes instance at home is a veritable fountain of music related metadata. And, depending on what you listen to, shame. The better question is what you’re doing with your data. Also, what that data can do for you.
The odds are good that your business is doing very little with its data at present. If you’re moderately reponsible, you’re leveraging web analytics for marketing purposes. If you’re an overachiever, you might even be leveraging that and tools like Scout Analytics or Spiceworks to assign values to average revenue per customer or total infrastructure cost.
Beyond that, though, most of you are probably seeing little to no value from what you’re generating. Depending on how much you generate, in fact, data may be actively costing you money. Whether your business is APIs, cloud platforms, databases, development tools, distributed source code management, operating systems, programming language frameworks, virtualization infrastructure or…well, you get the picture. Most of you have substantial latent value in generated data.
What platform versions are being downloaded? What geographies is your service popular in? Which APIs are being consumed? What progamming languages are most popular? From web analytics of your documentation to user activation data, you can answer these questions. But this isn’t happening at present.
And why would it? You’re no more in the business of data analysis and extraction than we are in architectural salvage. Your focus is, as it should be, on your business. Our business at RedMonk, however, is analysis. Not…whatever it is that you do.
Come talk to us. We’re working with more and more businesses like yours to identify and extract value. Sometimes – as with the JavaScript related insights we gleaned from Black Duck’s data last week – that value may be shining a light on the interesting things you’re doing, whether that’s through our free research or incorporating your branded and linked data into RedMonk Analytics. In other cases, it may be that your data is a saleable asset, in which case we know people who are – again, unlike you – in the business of commercializing your data for profit.
To recap, then: worst case? Free visibility. Best case? New revenue opportunites for an asset that you’re already producing anyway.
Why wouldn’t you come talk to us about your data, again?
