(Editor’s note: Suaad Sait is a co-founder of Workstreamer, Inc. He submitted this story to VentureBeat.)

A decade ago, company analysts were hardly in vogue. But as barriers to entry for startups tumble and competitors emerge from every corner, the company analyst has become one of the most critical functions in any organization.

They are the fuel for corporate strategy, the catalyst for change and often one of the few members of an organization who can turn business information into real action.

To operate in a competitive environment, today’s startups need to react quickly to changes and developments. Until now, though, businesses have moved at remarkably slow speeds – chiefly because it took too long to gather, analyze and act upon the data they were tracking.  More importantly, there wasn’t that much data available in the first place.

It’s no longer about getting the data.  A vast amount of information about partners, customers, prospects and competitors is readily available across the Web today.  We all know that. The struggle these days is for businesses to analyze that flood of data into meaningful and actionable intelligence – and do it as quickly as possible.

The number of sources that have to be monitored are immense – and the range of information itself can be potentially overwhelming. For example, the most recent figures from Technorati show the number of blogs being indexed stands at 133 million; on average, 900,000 blog posts are created within a single 24-hour period; Twitter is registering nearly 50 million tweets a day; and LinkedIn has over 50 million registered users.

A recent study by Burson-Marsteller found that 79 percent of the Fortune Global 100 companies are active on either Facebook, Twitter, YouTube or corporate blogs – or some combination of the social media platforms.

Good data is no good late

Traditionally the company analyst’s role was to comb through research produced by analyst firms and third-party market researchers.  But if your competitive strategy still hinges on analyst reports that are published quarterly (or worse, annually), you’re in trouble.

Most businesses still rely on quarterly market summaries that are delivered in the form of an enormous PDF files from their analyst firms.  Industries with more strict regulations and reporting requirements might have industry-standard reports that are generated and delivered to each business on a weekly, monthly or quarterly basis.

All the while, features like LinkedIn’s new “Follow Company” (which tries to make sense of that site’s network data by allowing you to track information like new job openings or inter-personnel promotions within an organization) provides data in real-time.  And those types of capabilities reveal just the tip of the iceberg in the growing capabilities of business tracking and listening.

To be truly valuable, this information needs to be tied together with all of the corollary data buried in blogs, tweets, contact directories and public databases.  The hard part isn’t getting the big picture of all the data, though. The hard part is turning it into business strategy just as fast.

Real-time business information has been democratized – the winners and the losers will now be determined by company analysts who can mine for insights and turn those insights into organizational action.

Don’t have an analyst on staff? If you’re hoping to succeed and outmaneuver your market in the next decade, it’s time to get one – fast.