How We Helped Our Clients Reduce Their Costs And Increase Profits In 2020 – Data Consulting
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Technology has been speeding forward through 2020. The impacts of Covid have only sped up the adoption of change for companies.
Companies small and big, start-ups and corporations have been pushed to innovate and improve processes.
For example, small, medium, and large companies are migrating to the cloud to ensure their staff can do work from anywhere. This has been a decent amount of the work I have taken on this year.
I have also noticed an interest in small and medium organizations for not only adoption of the cloud but also improved data analytics as well as getting away from cumbersome workflows being managed in Excel.
Much of these changes are possible thanks to the technology that has existed for the past 5-10 years. It’s just with the pressure from all the economic changes, companies have had to take a serious look at the tools they use. While also optimizing their processes.
In this article, I wanted to talk about some how our clients reduced their costs and increased their profits in 2020. As well as discuss some of the trends I have seen over the past year as I worked with our various clients and where I see them accelerating.
Small Business Owners Will Have Been Taking Advantage Of The Cloud And Machine Learning
The use of the cloud and machine learning is already very much commonplace in large companies. But smaller companies have been slower to adopt these two technologies into their day-to-day workflows.
However, in 2020 I have worked on two cloud migrations, several analytical projects, and a machine learning model for several of our clients.
This led them to cost-savings and improved revenue.
One of the major factors has been Covid and all their teams being stuck at home. This has forced companies that weren’t on the cloud to migrating.
I spent this year spinning up one VPC to help provide a client the ability for all their workers to continue to have access to their mission-critical tools that used to only be accessible on-premise.
The company went from a near standstill and relying on Google Docs as their only real method of working together. To actually being able to access all of their software from services like AWS Workspace and RDS.
Overall, this has not only helped the teams have access from home. But has also helped reduce the amount of administration required to manage the companies various servers and machines.
In turn, their migration has helped them improve their budget in a time when companies are looking for cost savings.
Companies Are Looking To Data To Create New More Scalable Products And Services
One of the first start-ups I worked for relied 100% on the revenue from data and analytical products. It’s the only service I provided. Companies gave us data and I provided analytics and algorithms based on said data.
This was easy to scale and provided great profit margins.
In 2020, many of our clients took on a similar mindset.
One of our clients was forced to seek new revenue sources. They realized that data and analytics was one possible option in terms of new sales and services.
For example, this client had a more traditional business that was heavily reliant on tourists and businesses being opened. With all that shutdown, all of their current income went to 0. I don’t mean their income went down %30-%50 percent. I mean 0.
So I have been working with them to develop alternative solutions and products using all of their data that they have collected over the past decade of business.
Now with things slowly opening up again, I are able to go out and sell these analytics to other similar businesses who are looking to cut costs.
Another client is also looking to develop new products for their SaaS service. Using products like AWS Comprehend, I have been able to help them develop several models to be the basis of these products.
I find this is one of the places that some companies miss. Especially smaller companies that maybe aren’t in the tech field. They might feel like they can’t benefit from the scalable revenue sources that tech has. But if you have data on your operations, there is a chance you could mold it into a totally new product.
Meaning more revenue sources when executed well.
Moving Away From Excel Using Low-Code/No-Code Options
Some trends are just that. Trends.
They rise and fall. I feel Low-Code/No-Code is here to stay.
Low-Code/No-Code is far from new. Many of us have used drag and drop tools from developing ASP.Net applications to Tableau.
However, with the recent billion-dollar valuation of Retool, I see the rise of truly robust Low-Code/No-Code tooling in 2021. Our team has had the chance to work with Retool on a few projects, and it really is great. There are a wide array of data connectors beyond just connecting to databases.
You can set up API calls, JS scripts, deep-link with IDs, and essentially build an entire internal solution in a fraction of the time with broad customization options. Some companies are already using it to replace tools like Salesforce and seeing massive benefits.
This option of using Low-Code/No-Code has become even more of a reality due to the increased reliance on the cloud as well as serverless computing. Both of these remove a lot of administration off of companies as well as make databases and functions quick to spin up.
I have used this solution to help improve a client Excel driven workflow. The client had tried to use Salesforce but found it only met a very limited scope of their needs. This is where software like Retool comes in.
With Retool I were able to take the client’s processes and streamline them so all their data went to a central database. Instead of their data being saved on various spreadsheets.
This also had the benefit of when it comes to reporting as the company now could easily pull data from one place. Rather than manually putting together multiple pieces of data from all the various spreadsheets manually.
But that’s a story for a different article.
Also, just to add one more point to this trend. Low-Code/No-Code is not limited to workflow management. I are also seeing the rise of Low-Code/No-Code in ETLs and ELTs with tools like Fivetran and Panoply. Both of which offer the ability to create data analytics platforms with limited amounts of code to scrape your data.
The Adoption Of Serverless/Storage And Compute Separated Data Design
Snowflake in 2020 was the largest Software IPO of all time. What some people might not understand about Snowflake’s underlying architecture is that it was developed to take full advantage of everything cloud.
In particular, its ability to separate storage vs. compute is one reason it has been made so popular so fast. By separating storage vs compute the ability to take advantage of the elastic properties of the cloud provides major advantages when it comes to performance.
This is far from unique as many modern data storage systems are following suit. For example products like Rockset that do the same thing for similar benefits.
Referencing this trend has less to do with the clients I have done technical work for this year.
However, I do a lot of content creation. Some for myself. But about %15 of my revenue comes from writing. Of which, many of my clients here are in the serverless and or storage separated compute technology areas.
I lumped these two concepts together since they both refer to content. But overall, I are seeing a rise in requests for content in these two areas. Suggesting that these areas are popular at the very least with VCs as these companies are continually getting more funding.
In addition, I also see the value of both of these more modern infrastructure styles. Serverless provides the ability to easily develop functions that can be used by any application.
Whereas separating compute and storage allows for systems that can continue to have great performance regardless of the number of users and requests that the systems need to manage.
2020 Was Just The Beginning
2020 laid the groundwork for lots of companies to assess and optimize their business process and systems. These tech trends that I saw this year were heavily forced in many cases on our clients. Whether it be finally turning to the cloud or looking for cost-saving opportunities through data.
With so many companies further embracing technology and all the possible benefits, it will be interesting to see how 2021 expands upon these changes. I had the opportunity to help improve several companies this year. Thanks to the accessibility of the cloud and easy to use data analytics platforms has helped level the playing field for companies of all sizes.
I am still working with many of our clients to further look for cost savings across their business. If you need help migrating your business to the cloud, improving your data analytics, or reducing manual work through automation, then feel free to reach out to us today.
I would love to set up a 30-minute call with you and discuss how I can improve your data and cloud strategy today.
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