More than 65% of the 1,300 CIOs and IT decision makers who participated in a recent Asia/Pacific excluding Japan (APEJ) survey consider Business Analytics (BA) a top priority for their organisations, both in the short and long term, according to IDC.

In the "Big Data" era, the need to cope with the aggressive growth of data, as well as contend with the increased variety of data sources, is introducing a number of challenges for organisations and also significant opportunities.

IDC expects increased awareness and adoption of BA in order to support faster and more accurate decision-making.

IDC’s Asia/Pacific Business Analytics Pulse Survey, which carried out in June 2011, found that 29% of organisations in the region are evaluating "Big Data" tools and over 30% still do not have plans regarding these technologies.

IDC Asia/Pacific program manager of business analytics and enterprise applications Daniel-Zoe Jimenez said ‘Big Data’ was still a nascent market and the use of ‘Big Data’ technologies is still in experimentation phase for Asian organisations.

He added, "However, we expect specific use cases to drive awareness and adoption of ‘Big Data’ technologies in 2012, particularly for Banks, Telcos and Governments."

The more mature organizations are also moving up the "analytics value chain" focusing on predictive capabilities like forecasting, modeling and optimisation.

Jimenez said, "For the mature markets where increased competition will drive laser focus in defensive strategies, we will see BA being used to improve cost control and customer loyalty, as well as to optimize business operations.

Similarly, as businesses in Asia invest to drive growth in emerging markets, they are harnessing analytics-led solutions to gain better customer insights, manage risk and financial metrics more effectively, and at the same time, strive for unique market differentiation."