October 23, 2012–Just when you thought you’d seen it all another fascinating implementation of data analysis emerges. In the interview “PepsiCo Betting Big on Data Analytics: Caroline Watteeuw,” Business Today‘s Goutam Das, PepsiCo‘s Global Chief Technology Officer and Senior Vice President of Business Information Solutions Caroline Watteeuw talks about the companies tech to watch. On the top of her list is a company wide strategy called SMAC.
We are betting on what we call SMAC. It is Social, Mobile, Advanced and Immersive Analytics, Cloud. There are a couple of things that are not relevant for PepsiCo but interesting. I call them comeback kids. If you go back 15 years when Xerox was at its peak, it was all about very precise ink-jet printers. Right now, people are trying to use ink-jet printer technology and refocus it on creating organs (researchers at the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine, for instance, are using modified ink-jet technology to build tissue and organ prototypes). It is absolutely phenomenal. Then there are three dimensional maps. You have 3D TV, gaming and printing. 3D maps will allow you to navigate through different layers of geography to do oil and gas exploration in a very different way.
It makes sense for Pepsi to want a greater return on the mountains data their many social media campaigns and consumer reports provide them. Harnessing the power of that information can for instance, strengthen advertising strategies as Watteeuw mentions later in the interview, specifically the changing habits of the aging baby boomer generation.
Notice the “A”. It stands for “Advanced and Immersive Analytics”. That’s right up a company like Digital Reasoning‘s alley and with the help of their Sythesys and SynthesysCloud they could easily handle the “M” and “C” as well.
Michael Ison
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
