By: Vinay Samuel, Founder and CEO, Zetaris
Businesses have been burned by inefficient data analytics programs that were slow, cumbersome, costly and complex. Data teams have focussed on the technical issues and missed the business case and the need for fast return on investment (ROI).
It has never been more crucial in business to understand your customer and to run digital projects that deliver insights the business really needs. Business leaders need to drive reform and the adoption of new tools and methodologies to get smarter about how they use data to remain competitive, anticipate market shifts, adapt to changing customer preferences and be agile to pivot and change strategies if needed.
Being able to anticipate customer needs, spot market trends and anticipate market shifts, and having the intelligence to know when to develop new products and services enables organisations to be a step ahead of competitors and deliver superior customer service.
Data enables businesses to innovate and better manage operational costs. Everything from spotting emerging trends to knowing precisely what stock to order depends on timely access to the right data. And with boards focussed on ESG targets and other critical metrics, data is critical to every organisational level.
With systems now deployed across a variety of different platforms including software, platform and infrastructure delivered as a service, organisations pulling data together from multiple sources to make decisions has become more complex. One of the reasons cloud services are so attractive is that the time to value is fast. But the ability to make fast decisions and act on them is now of critical importance.
Despite all the benefits that come from using private and public cloud solutions, bringing data into a single decision making platform remains difficult and creates data storage, compute and labour duplication. The traditional approach for centralising data into a single data warehouse or lakehouse – extract, transform and load (ETL) process – requires significant technical resources, copious storage and compute capacity and is difficult to change when new data needs to be integrated or when business units want to ask different questions.
A decentralised approach changes this significantly by making data from any source instantly available. Organisations can continue to work with their preferred analytics tools. And when a new data source is needed, it can be added to the decentralised data platform in hours, not the months it can take with ETL solutions.
The ROI from a decentralised approach to data analytics is significant. Access to data for decision making is drastically accelerated and the process for accessing new data sources is vastly simplified, requiring fewer technical resources and at far lower cost. Users are no longer limited to data that can easily be integrated into a centralised data warehouse as the decentralised approach uses metadata rather than being limited by the structure of the source database.
It’s not large companies that eat the small. It’s the smartest movers that leap past the slow. Making the best decisions relies on having the fastest access to the right data. A decentralised data platform enables organisations to access data quickly and securely at a lower cost than traditional approaches with greater flexibility and agility.
