The holiday shopping season is behind us—and now, we move on to my favorite time of year: the data platform shopping season. Organizations in every industry are looking to find ways to leverage technology to transform their businesses and disrupt the status quo. We recently worked with the Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG), an IT research, analyst, IT strategy firm to determine how this trend is impacting organizations’ technology decisions—in short, what’s on their shopping lists?
Here’s what they discovered that companies wanted most:
Simplification. Of the organizations ESG Surveyed, a full 20 percent have more than 100 unique database instances, and 38 percent have between 25 and 50. The efforts and costs of implementing and maintaining these infrastructures are overwhelming. Not surprisingly, more than 50 percent of firms are actively consolidating their database infrastructures, and another 25 percent plan to do so over the coming 12 months. Simplicity is the key to agility, and it all starts with a leaner database architecture.
Concurrent Transactions and Analytics. ESG found that businesses want hybrid, concurrent transactional and analytic processing within a single platform. This capability enables organizations to obtain real-time insights and perform real-time actions with information happening now, as well as large sets of historical data. This is vital for fraud detection, customer targeting and personalization, predictive maintenance, regulatory compliance, adherence to concentration rules, and situational awareness for first responders. Nearly 70 percent of organizations across virtually every industry are using in-memory processing to support concurrent transactional and analytic processing.
Cloud. The most important attribute when selecting a database, according to the survey, is support for the cloud. Nearly half of respondents put cloud deployment in their top three priorities, and it’s little surprise, given the dynamic pressures on businesses and the flexible scalability of the cloud.
Other top requirements include encryption, full SQL compliance, in-memory processing, and efficient scaling capabilities:
Time to Value. While there is a clear desire to minimize the length of time it takes to derive value from a new data platform, more than 80% of organizations surveyed expect it to take more than six months—but they expect to see value before two years.
According to ESG, “[a]s such, an agile and flexible solution that is easily deployed and managed both on premises and in the cloud, which also satisfies as many database workload requirements as possible associated with scalability, performance, and reliability, will ensure that a solution lands atop a buyer’s shopping list.”
That’s a tall order this data platform shopping season, but a challenge that we’re ready to meet.