I started to wonder whether Europe, North America, South America and Asia as regions differ in whether the focus in dialog is still in data as a product or data as a service? Are there differences and if so what kind of?
This would be business-wise one factor to consider when launching data-driven products or services. Knowing where the landscape favors either or would probably make marketing and sales operations more efficient. And of course, you might want to target the area where buyers favor your product or service approach.
One approach to finding out the differences is to see what is trending in searches people do.
Method and limitations
To get the first indicative insights on the mentioned questions, I decided to take a shortcut and use the Google Trends service. The results shown below are by no means scientifically valid or intended to present any academic research results. The intention was just to see if there would be something worth exploring in more detail and with a rigor approach/methodology.
In Google Trends I used keywords Data as a Product and Data as a Service. Of course one might say that I should have used data product, and that critique can be considered accurate. I did include data product in the analysis of the overall trends just to see how the terms compare. The timeframes used in the queries were 5 years and 10 months.
Numbers in the charts represent search interest relative to the highest point on the chart for the given region and time. A value of 100 is the peak popularity for the term. A value of 50 means that the term is half as popular. A score of 0 means that there was not enough data for this term.
Data product is the king
It must be stated that the term data product is often in popularized business discussions used to include also servitized data aka data as a service.
In the follow charts I left vague data product term out. The vagueness of the terms in data economy is another factor reducing the accuracy of the analysis.
Longer trend favors data as a service
UK clearly sticks out
At first I took a look at the 5 years long period to see longer trend in differences regarding the rhetorics in selected countries in different continents. South America was excluded since the hits in there were so scarce compared to other locations.
UK seems to differ clearly compared for example with US. In the UK, 83 percent interest rate for data as a service indicates that service-driven value creation approach in data economy is dominant.
Ok, the above shows the longer trend differences in selected locations. What about last 12 months? How does the more recent situation look like?
Singapore and UK indicate strong interest in Data as a Service
The deviation is slightly less dramatic if the timeframe is 12 months. Now the interest rate for data as a service in the UK is 72 percent which is over 10% less than in 5 year-long trend.
But interestingly the situation in Singapore is the opposite. The interest rate for data as a service is 5% higher than on the long-time trend.
For Nothern America, the short-term trend shows almost a tie between data as a product and data as a service.