A Formula 1 racing car is bristling with the latest technology, from sophisticated energy recapture and drag reduction systems to state-of-the-art materials and aerodynamics. But to fulfill its core purpose of winning races, it still needs the best engine.
The same is true of the modern business. To get the best out of technologies like artificial intelligence, machine learning, the Internet of Things (IoT), cloud, advanced analytics, robotics, and blockchain – and become a truly intelligent enterprise – you need the most powerful business data platform under the hood.
So, what makes a world-class business data platform? Let’s take a look at some of the key components and characteristics.
In-memory computing is the transformative technology breakthrough, enabling both analytic and transactional workloads to be combined on a single instance of data on a single platform. This vastly simplifies application development and data preparation and eliminates the need for separate operational data stores and many data marts. Built-in advanced analytics and multi-model processing enable storage and processing of advanced data structures on the same platform, dramatically reducing data sprawl and the need for specialized data management technology. All of this helps IT organizations deliver unrivaled speed, reducing time to value while simplifying application architectures and IT landscapes. But beware of imitations: A true in-memory database was built from the ground up on a simplified architecture, rather than merely bolting an in-memory capability onto an existing database.
Winning and losing often comes down to small margins. The ability to get instant insights from all your data and make rapid decisions is a vital competitive advantage. A business data platform for the intelligent enterprise delivers next-generation transactional and analytical processing with the broadest array of advanced analytics capabilities on any data – graph, documents, text, search, spatial, streaming, machine learning, and predictive. It will help create a single trusted view of the truth from any number of sources – including Hadoop, IoT, and the cloud – with high data integrity and minimal duplication. And it provides a single business interface for all users, with radically simplified data access without moving data from place to place to act on it.
The pace of innovation is relentless. The intelligent enterprise needs a business data platform that enables rapid, trusted, business outcome-based innovation without the risk of security or privacy compliance breaches. This flexible, future-ready platform supports application development with open interfaces and tools to leverage existing assets and skills, and business content and algorithms to accelerate applications and insights. These will include prepackaged in-database services for recurring business data processing that integrate with industry standard development environments, and extensive libraries of optimized machine learning and predictive algorithms. The platform also supports hybrid and multi-cloud environments so you can develop once and deploy everywhere.
Companies around the world are already leveraging the power of a business data platform to differentiate their solutions and services, create new business models and revenue streams, deliver a best-in-class user experience, and rapidly build, modernize, and extend business applications that deliver data-driven outcomes. Here are just a few examples.
Anyone who’s extended their house knows how difficult it can be to coordinate all the different contractors and materials so the project is completed on time and on budget with minimal wastage.
