One of the key messages to come out of the recent Cloudera event in London is the idea of working with the data ecosystem of IT providers to achieve business goals.
Explaining the role of the IT ecosystem, Merv Adrian, head of IT market strategy, said organizations should start using the ecosystem. “Boards are willing to take risks,” he said. “They believe that change is necessary and possible. But only 20% say that they are going anywhere with change. The way we work is with leading partners in the market working together, to change together the systems we have today in the most cost-effective way.”
Adrian said 69% of organizations believe they have multiple analytics platforms. Data, he said, is also stored and organizations run multiple relational databases. This leads to problems; there is no single type of truth and it is difficult to derive value from data across multiple data sources.
According to Adrian, using open standards encourages data sharing. “When we free up the economy, we can do new things,” he said.
In Gartner Impact of the data ecosystem report, published in April, the expert said that data management is no longer completely considering data relationships. “Texts, graphs, timelines, large sections, key cost, ledger and other storage areas all manage to provide optimization for different types of data and different processes,” the authors of the report wrote.
A data ecosystem is seen by many as providing a way to pre-integrate data from a variety of sources in order to bring it to life and optimize it to support business decision-making.
This is how Legal and General Investment Management (LGIM), which also appeared at Evolve 2023, used Cloudera. Wulstan Reeve, head of data marketing at LGIM, said the data group wants to provide business and customer needs quickly, but pulling the right information to the public is a difficult task. Providing the right information means access. Data, he said, should also be available on demand. Then, there is the problem that people face in searching for the content of the existing data, which requires data discovery. Data integrity and accountability are other priorities that LGIM needs to consider.
In order to support the data policy established by the company’s chief data officer, the team must define what is required from the data platform and the company’s technology strategy, which is close to cloud-first. Stuart Toll, senior business architect at LGIM, said time to market, integration time and efficiency were among the criteria used to evaluate data providers. For Toll, while LGIM could have developed any data platform, he said “we are an asset management company”. “We buy where we can and just build to differentiate.”
This affected the company’s data integration process. LGIM didn’t want to be in the business of sewing a lot of tools together, as Matt Bannock, head of data engineering at LGIM, explained. “I don’t think there’s a bad tool on the market anymore,” he said. “There are a lot of good players, but what matters is the timing of the sale.”
Bannock said that with other tools, IT departments need to spend time integrating data. “Being able to just start working with the data, start calculating and start creating the output is more important to us than half the profit we can get if we create our own environment,” he said. “There’s a lot of value in buying natural products.”
While the company uses best-of-breed tools when necessary, it bought into the Cloudera ecosystem, which provides a data platform that supports hybrid environments and multi-layered security, governance and metadata management.
Gartner says that today’s data is distributed, disparate and disparate. The experiences of the data and analytics experts Gartner spoke with indicate that there is a significant concerted effort needed to ensure that the IT systems in place can operate seamlessly.
According to Gartner, the industry is beginning to respond, with cloud services and software programs that are creating a mature data environment as the market moves from “another important meeting” to more advanced events.
As LGIM has found, the level of integration that exists now means that IT teams can avoid having to go to great lengths to connect these disparate sources to deliver the business market.
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