Is Business Analytics the next BOOM ?

Wikipedia refers business analytics to the skills, technologies, applications and practices for continuous iterative exploration and investigation of past business performance to gain insight and drive business planning. Well and rightly said so, now what does it mean to me, you or anyone who wishes to be a part of the next boom after IT. This time there is room for making mistakes as there is no shortage of skilled labour and availability of training. There is a huge corpus of unemployed and ready to graduate job-seekers who will at one signal jump into the vast ocean of this field of analytics.

We are producing around 2328306436 GB of data each day. Now we can't just simply generate this data, we have to make meaning and sense out of it, and build something useful that helps us improve our lives. The previously relied upon "gut feeling" to make decisions, is no longer highly reliable in this technological world.Today VPs' and CEOs' are trying trying to get the best out of their massive data and IT alone can't just help them. Keeping a real-time tab on customer's demands and fulfilling them is what they desire today.

In this uncertain world, how does analytics promises powerful insights, reduced costs and increased profits ?

Analytics converts extensive data, stats and quants into insights that can drive efficient decisions and derive strategies.For every buck spent on analytics, companies reportedly get a return value of almost 1000%. Leave alone the industries, just imagine how much could governments save in terms of operational costs if they were to adopt analytics to analyse their earnings and expenditures. 

 Needless to say but my gut feeling says that business analytics is ready to take the world by storm, and we might be lucky (intelligent) enough to swing a ride with it into the future.

Why a QA makes a better BA !

Some people asked me to write more about how does a test engineer gains an advantage over developers when it comes to being a good business analyst. Here's it.
As a tester, you get access to certain integration and pipe diagrams which are often not given to developers, maybe due to contractual obligations and often because projects are so large that a developer would not like to waste his time understanding the different flows across modules but instead focus on understanding his own module. (Keeping in mind number of modules run into four or five digits)
The understanding of key business flows help build and gain knowledge of systems and also the domain of the project. And a business analyst does just the same !
So if you are looking for a future in analyst or consultant roles, then quality analyst is the role to play in your early  years. Yes there are other ways to go about that also, such as doing a MBA or some management related course, but it then it compromises on your work experience for that period of time.
Take your call carefully buddy :)