Ginni Rometty, Charlie Thomas and Chris Checco on the Disruptive Power of Real-Time Personalization, Predictive Analytics and Cognitive Computing

Between Feb. 24 and Feb. 27, Mobile World Capital Barcelona hosted the 2014 Mobile World Congress, the annual conference and exhibition that attracts keynote speakers from some of the world’s foremost corporations, and exhibitions of the next-generation of cutting-edge innovations and technologies.

The theme of this year’s event was “Creating What’s NEXT” and many participants and industry commentators honed their focus on the disruption caused by technologies including new mobile devices, virtualization and the Internet of Things.

For a piece keying off of this theme, Charlie Thomas, CEO of Razorsight, told Pipeline Magazine that as many of these disruptors begin to converge, that disruption stands to amplify greatly.

“Real time analytics has only just begun to ‘create what’s next,’ Thomas said.

“I believe the future will see real time analytics technologies embedded directly in devices, just as Google Glass has embedded technologies once spread across dozens of devices into a set of cutting-edge spectacles.”

A longtime provider of cloud-based analytics tools for firms in industries including media and communications, Razorsight announced its own major leap into the mobile world soon before the MWC by releasing what it called the “world’s first real-time predictive analytics apps for smartphones.”

Razorsight Real Time Analytics, with predictive insights, features four apps for individuals responsible for “customer experience management” in sales and marketing; finance; operations; and network.

“Unlike similar ‘wannabe’ real time services that rely on dated ‘heuristic’ data, Razorsight Real Time Analytics leverages live streaming data to provide an accurate read on the customer’s situation, context and issues in just seconds,” noted Chris Checco, Razorsight’s president and chief analytics officer.

“Best of all, communications and media companies can use real time analytics ‘on the fly’ with an app tailored to their area of customer expertise and responsibility,” Checco added.

In discussing their company and new apps, Thomas and Checco hit on many areas that IBM CEO Ginni Rometty would include in her around 45-min keynote address to close out MWC.

Rometty summed up her speech with “three words: Data, cloud and engagement.”

“Cloud-first and mobile-first – it’s certainly the mantra in all of my development divisions,” she said. “Cloud extends the enterprise: it integrates, it’s part of.”

Rometty added that “we will not only forever change how we engage, but understand people at an individual level” and that success in the emerging engagement culture will be measured according to speed, personalization, security and trust.

“For enterprises, mobile will put a premium on… speedy, prescriptive analytics,” Rometty noted.

From Razorsight’s perspective, Thomas commented that it is critical for mobile operators to have “the ability to offer mass customization in the way that Nike has, and to deliver unique ‘experiences’ based on customer preferences, demographics and location.”

“Typically, the best results come from a combination of absolute business rules and real time analytics,” added Checco.

Razorsight accordingly built its real-time analytics solutions to merge historical data with data attributes gathered at the moment of interaction – such as the answer to a live question or recent usage data – before running that merged data through statistical algorithms.

“It then uses scoring algorithms and categorical models created to apply additional statistical or heuristic business logic,” Checco said, noting that “an arbitrage engine parses and prioritizes the results for use.”

“Ultimately, Razorsight will cut that delivery window to a sub-second response time,” Checco said.

From Rometty’s perspective, the greatest power of data – and the competitive advantage that it brings – will be unlocked by “those who push their analytics beyond descriptive and predictive.”

“The third age of computing is cognitive,” Rometty noted. “An era of machines that learn when they are taught.”

Razorsight sees self-learning capabilities helping to drive and compound gains at “a very clean and clear intersection” between three “integrated realms”: big data, micro data and real-time analytics.

In a future mix of data types and functionalities, Checco says that integration could surround a ‘big data analytics’ platform that gathers streaming information while a ‘micro data analytics’ platform analyzes that data for certain campaigns, and a ‘real-time analytics’ platform assesses campaign impacts in the moment to help identify and deliver the appropriate communications and channels.

“Big data analytics continues to gather the effects of the micro data and real time analytics treatments through the feedback and self-learning features,” Checco added, noting that “micro data and real time will then use the feedback and self-learning features to continually improve the treatments and identify new micro- and macro-trends.”