How much does big data cost? 

I'd like to spend a few moments today unpacking this essential question. It's an important one, and our conversations about it with data partners and clients have been (frankly) all over the map.

Let's start at one end of the spectrum with wineries themselves, who share their own data with us in order for it to be visualized, packaged, and significantly more accessible.

If you're a winery, you know how valuable that data is. You know how hard you work to accumulate information about your customers, for example. You know how long it takes, how hard it is to maintain, and how many resources are dedicated to it.

There's serious value there, plus you already own it. The question is whether you're tapping into the intelligence it holds. The cost in this case derives not from acquiring the data (which is typically very pricey) but from the expertise to mine it, which relatively speaking costs much less.

Let's also look at the other end of the spectrum to our big data partners who spend, in most cases, millions of dollars on the underlying architecture of their platform, and on the data models and user interfaces in order to collect the most complete and accurate records possible.

There's serious value there too, especially if you need to understand consumer sentiment and behavior around your wine, or if you're launching a new product, or if you're in new customer acquisition mode.

Enolytics finds itself somewhere in the middle of that spectrum. We have infrastructure costs such as the highest levels of encryption, in order to ensure confidentiality and top performance. We also have the costs of data mining tools, analytics portals and, of course, the wages we pay to our team of data scientists.

Is there value to each of these things? Yes. Are there also costs? Certainly. 

Accounting for the price of big data goes a lot deeper than you might think at first, and we wanted to explain a little bit about why.

So.

What can you can do with the data that's this clean, hard-won, and well-scrubbed?

You can base very sound business decisions on it, for starters, that could save your company hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not more.

It could also make your company that much, and more.

The impact on the top and bottom line is significant, and how much big data costs is commensurate with that impact.

I hope that helps, and that you'll let us know if you have questions or would like a quote. There are a lot of factors that go into the cost of big data, as you can see, and our goal is to price it fairly for both our clients and our partners.

You might be surprised.

Thank you, as always, for reading —