Two business disciplines that are significantly challenging for many companies today are new product development and customer support. New product failure rates hover in the 40 percent range, much too high given the amount of information on customer preferences available today. At the same time, customer service costs continue to increase, driven by the greater complexity of today's products, higher salary costs for customer service personal and higher expectations for quality service among customers.

IoT analytics provide new, deeper insights that enable product development and customer service teams to perform better, enhance customer satisfaction and reduce costs.

Machine data has traditionally been difficult to collect and analyze, due to both the enormous amounts and different types of data involved. Data comes in a variety of forms, such as text logs, XML, JSON, CSV or SNMP. There are also different data class categories, such as event messages, configuration blobs and statistical dumps. Data is also likely to be in different protocols, such as email, FTP, SFTP, as a stream or as a batch log file.

Advanced analytics companies have developed new solutions that are able to handle the volumes and disparate types of data involved, making machine data analytics practical and affordable for a much wider range of companies. To solve the challenge of rapidly digesting and analyzing large volumes of disparate data, advanced analytics, companies have developed hyper scale platforms and analytics languages to parse, tag, model and store data. These languages provide a single step solution for parsing data and storing it in a structured data store. Once in the data store, analytics team can combine this data with other company data sources, such as bug databases, knowledge databases, et al.

Critical to developing and marketing new products or enhancing customer service practices is creating a "single point of truth," a body of data and insights that is comprehensive, accurate and timely. These data/insights will provide all disciplines within the company the information they need to make critical decisions. Essential elements of an information platform to provide this single point of truth include: