This white paper outlines the latest customer analytics opportunities and challenges facing sales, marketing, and customer service decision makers. It draws on IDC's research into big data and analytics (BDA) business and technology trends and provides recommendations for organizations looking to improve their customer analytics initiatives. The paper also considers the role of workload optimized systems as a technology platform to enable customer analytics and describes the IBM PureData System for Analytics as one of the leading workload-optimized systems in the market today.