We've reached the 8^thinstallment of our blog series on Cisco's Big Data and Analytics vision (beginning with Scott Ciccone's blog on September 23). No doubt by now you have either seen or heard about Cisco's broad data and analytics portfolio presented at Strataconf in New York on Oct. 15. And if you missed our October 21st executive webcast 'Unlock Your Competitive Edge with Cisco Big Data and Analytics Solutions,' please check it out.  Now you're probably eager to know how to make the most of our approach to data analytics. How can you benefit the most-and the most quickly-from data analysis in your organization?

Customers come to us to ask for support in extracting valuable and actionable business insights from their large stocks of network data. Their goal is always to drive both operational efficiencies and new revenue opportunities. Rapid changes in the business environment increase pressure on time-to-value: savings and revenues need to be brought in as quickly as possible. But traditional ways to extract value from data, complicated by volume, velocity and variety issues, often have a very long time-to-value. In fact, data analytics consulting projects historically take a year or longer to complete. Customers get handed large scale implementation plans and, by the time the program is implemented, the wind has changed: the market opportunity has closed, and the business has moved on.

That's why for some time now I've been a student of accelerating time to value for data analytics. Our job is not just to show our customers the hidden business value of their data, but also to bring that value to them fast. We have developed a rapid prototyping, iterative approach that continuously develops actionable insights from network and other sources of data. Our approach contains four steps to help our customers quickly develop, test, and implement business ideas and processes:

Step One:We start by working with customers and identify key use cases through an "Internet of Everything" iterative planning approach. Our experts don't just present an idea, but a complete, ready-to-test hypothesis, using visualization techniques and an analytics design approach to discover new ways to do business, based on analytics insights.

Step Two:We use a rapid data extraction approach to capture the data needed to test that hypothesis. We fully leverage Cisco's Connected Analytics platform, enabling automated data collection and simple correlations exploration.

Step Three:Once we have the data we need, we apply a data science approach to build an "analytics sandbox" in which we test the proposed use cases and measure its outcomes. We use rapid prototyping to test theories, quickly working through iterations to develop a truly working business model for our customers' unique situations. In the process we are able to identify new insights that became the basis for the next use cases.

Step Four:The result is a set of modular Business Insights, which we interpret and thoroughly test, and turn into an actionable plan that we execute. This makes it relatively easy for our experts to integrate insights and actions into our customers' transformation initiatives-and in a fraction of the time of traditional data-driven solutions.

The world of top down, outside-in consulting, where value comes from individuals' experience, is gone. Value today is enabled by the capability of companies like Cisco to extract and interpret data about our customers' core business, enabling agile decision making and rapid process transformation.

As the Internet of Everything becomes a pervasive reality, we see that analytics is what creates value from all of these connections value. To learn more about Cisco's vision for the Internet of Everything, read Joseph Bradley's blog on Thursday, October 23!#UnlockBigData