Data is Not Just Important to Big Business Anymore

The acronym HCI itself is used to refer to Hyperconvergent Infrastructure, and as enterprises of all sizes and natures are increasingly moving toward advertising and selling their products and services online, from grocery shops to clothing stores, catering services, and event planners, it is possible now to order and pay for literally anything online. The data that is automatically stored and collected about the digital processes within an organisation is captured by HCI and used for analytics that drives business insights. Conventionally, HCI seemed like something that only big businesses would need or use, but HCI for small businesses is a trend that is likely to keep growing as more and more small enterprises enter the e-commerce arena. The digital infrastructure underlying any enterprise doing business online collects and stores everything from the terms or words a person used to search for a specific item, the pathways they followed to your online platform, the items they chose, the items they browsed or considered, and what they ended up buying—along with their personal information such as names, addresses, and payment methods. This data that is essentially just sitting there can give an enterprise insight into their target market and their own business processes, leading them to make changes that will boost their business and grow their market.  

Covered In This Article

HCI Data for Small Businesses: The Emergence of Inbound Marketing Trends
What Use is There in HCI Data for Small Businesses?
HCI Data for Small Businesses Helps you Locate your Clients
HCI Data for Small Businesses Reveal Client Preferences
Easily Generate Reports on Sales, Revenue, Losses, and Other Trends
HCI Data Helps You Identify Your Partners and Competitors
HCI Data for Small Businesses: Expensive Digital Infrastructure
Investing in HCI for Small Businesses: The Benefits will Offset the Expense in No Time

HCI Data for Small Businesses: The Emergence of Inbound Marketing Trends

As commerce, business, and transactions are increasingly completed through electronic or digital means, the commercial interface is no longer between a shopkeeper and a client, but between an internet shopping portal and an online customer. Increasingly, people don't go to shops to buy something they've seen advertised, they rather identify the need or desire for something, look for information about it online and then seek an online vendor that sells it—this is in essence what brought the trend of inbound marketing about.

The knowledge that clients already know what they are looking for, they just want some information on it and find out where they can buy it has turned the methodologies of marketing upside down. The production of data on clients, their needs, wants, and experiences with a certain enterprise have been a big industry for many decades. Traditionally, companies would contract market research firms to gather granular data from their selected audiences, but such data doesn't have the capacity to tell you how your enterprise can improve the digital capabilities that underlie your small business to make it perform better, faster, and with greater ease—not only for your clients but also for your employees.  

What Use is There in HCI Data for Small Businesses?

According to experts in the field, one of the key things a small business must do in order to benefit from the data it collects, processes, and stores, is to determine what it wants to use the data for and how it will assist the business in reaching its goals. The quality of the data is also very important, as bad quality information cannot give you any insights, it can actually be quite damaging, leading your business decisions down the wrong path, costing you money, and ultimately defeating your most important business plans and goals.  

HCI Data Helps you Locate your Clients

Data that is generated through transactions and interactions online can help you determine if your main client base is in a specific geographical area, the types of products they search for online, and whether they are a niche audience or a broader target market. HCI data for small businesses can help you identify if you are using the most efficient and economical ways of shipping your products, and if the courier services you use are able to reach even the most far-flung regions where clients are located. This can help you choose the best service, which, as an extension of your service offering, reflects upon the convenience, speed, and reliability of your enterprise.

HCI Data for Small Businesses Reveal Client Preferences

HCI data can be used to help you keep track of your inventory, and even give you access to detailed information about every product you sell if you ever need to provide such information to a client, not to mention the value it can add to your advertising. It can shed light on the influence the design of your website and shopping platform has on attracting traffic to your business, and if there are any ways in which you can make it easier for customers to find you through Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).

Preferred payment methods can be highlighted, giving you the opportunity to provide the payment options your clients prefer to use. It can give you insight into the average amount of revenue your business generates in a day, a week, a month, or a year, and if there are specific dates and times when traffic to your site is at its highest. You can track the number of items that are returned and why giving you insight into the quality of the inventory you procure and helping you decide whether it is worth your while to carry that particular product in your online store.

Easily Generate Reports on Sales, Revenue, Losses, and Other Trends

Any enterprise, whether big or small, needs to have information on their profits, their spending, their losses and how to minimise them, the value of the transactions they process disaggregated in a number of different ways, as well as other trends in order to report to their stakeholders and investors. HCI already collects this for you, and through some analysis and data manipulation, you can get answers to an extraordinary variety of questions about how well your business is doing, or if it is not, why it isn't.

HCI Data Helps You Identify Your Partners and Competitors

HCI data for small businesses can identify whether there are any linkages between your business and other enterprises in the same or similar industries that you probably didn't know about. In some instances, such linkages can be used to the benefit of a couple of vendors of similar products, such as in a scenario where clients who buy a certain product from another website thousands of miles away click through to your website to find a critical component or addition that would complement the product they bought at website number one. If you have knowledge like that, HCI for small businesses can help you and the other enterprise place backlinks to each other on your websites, allowing customers to easily gather all the bits and pieces they need. You can even get a sense of what clients end up using your products for, and exploit that information in your marketing strategies.

On the flip side, you can gain insight into the drivers of success among your competitors, allowing you to change your own ways of doing things that obviously were of great benefit to them, or come up with strategies to divert some of that business to your business.

HCI Data for Small Business: Expensive Digital Infrastructure

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the past have struggled to afford the sophisticated technologies used by big businesses for advanced analytics that can assist them in building their business and becoming more successful. This means that data—whether it is for a large multinational corporation or a small chain of toy makers—is of great value and strategic decisions can be and should be based on data analysis and informed interpretation. A data-driven approach enables every business to examine and organise their data with the goal of better serving their customers, and HCI data for small businesses makes that more possible than ever. 

In the era of cloud computing, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and automation, it became apparent rather quickly to the developers and producers of HCI technology that there is a significant gap in the market for HCI data for small business to be made affordable and available.  If big businesses can use HCI-generated data to promote themselves, the same principle would surely apply to small businesses as well. In fact, regardless of the size of your operations, data-driven decision-making is the gold standard in business best practice, and that is as true for small enterprises as it is for big ones. 

Companies of all sizes and in all kinds of industries are implementing machine learning and artificial intelligence to develop more comprehensive analytics strategies that will enhance their ability to achieve business goals. They are delving deeper into their data to increase efficiency, gain a greater competitive advantage, and boost their bottom lines even further. With hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) solutions that offer combined storage, networking, computing, and services in a single server unit have become more mainstream and affordable. This now gives SMEs access to solutions that for a long time, were only available to large enterprises.  

The Benefits will Offset the Expense in No Time

For businesses to make the most of their data HCI is the answer. It is cloud-ready, affordable, scalable, and easy to manage. Tarsus Distribution can assist your small business in selecting the best HCI infrastructure solution for your business, offering appropriate products from both Dell EMC and HPE. These small business solutions for data analytics will help businesses to unlock the value that exists within their data. It can also be the backbone for building a business environment in which services such as AI and the Internet of Things (IoT) can prosper.  

There are many benefits to HCI data for small business and implementing a data management system in your business. To mention just a few, it will assist with improving data quality and access, which will lead to better and quicker access to business data results and ensure seamless business operations, which in turn leads to better decision making and ultimately make your business more successful.  

As commercial environments become more complex, it is even more important now for businesses to invest in affordable end-to-end solutions that really add value to their operations and works seamlessly together to address data analytics and data management needs. Tarsus Distribution and its partners, Dell EMC and HPE have the right HCI data for small business solutions available right now.