Customers today expect a personalized experience across every channel. Companies are working feverishly to make the most of the 2.5 quintillion bytes of data created everyday to deliver seamless customer experience at every point in the lifecycle. 

Turning mammoth amounts of information into meaningful insight is no small feat. In his keynote at Informatica Cloud Next New York, Eric Berridge discussed the tremendous opportunity intelligent analytics affords: giving companies a competitive edge by taking them closer than ever to customers.

The most valuable companies in the world are using data to connect people and things. 

Such companies provide value by creating a relational network of people (Facebook, Uber, Airbnb) or things (Cisco, GE, AT&T). 

Move beyond predictive to prescriptive intelligence. 

Knowing what customers want before they do is valuable. Even more valuable are predictive models that prescribe actions in the moment to optimize the customer experience. Leading adopters have moved from complex dashboards to prescriptive tools that arm employees with relevant information that is actionable. And, they are doing it on the go from mobile devices.

Achieving prescriptive insights requires moving massive amounts of data in real time. 

Companies born in the cloud are at an advantage; their data is already in the cloud. Yet companies with more than 15 years of data likely house in a wide array of on-premises systems that are not well integrated. Cloud technology has made prescriptive insights more achievable than ever by making it easy to connect systems.

Today's companies have an incredible opportunity to engage customers at any moment with prescriptive intelligence. Give your employees actionable data — it's a powerful thing.

Have opinions on prescriptive analytics? Share your thoughts in the comments below, or get in touch.

See Eric Berridge live at Informatica Next San Francisco, April 14th. Register now.