One of the key messages emerging from the recent Cloudera event in London is the idea of working with a IT vendor data ecosystem to achieve a business goal.
In a presentation on the role of the IT ecosystem, Merv Adrian, Director of IT Market Strategies, said that organizations should start using ecosystems. “Boards are willing to take risks,” he said. “They believe that transformation is necessary and possible. But only 20% say they’re getting anywhere with the transformation. The way we make it work is with market-leading partners working together, to collectively transform the systems we have today in the most cost-effective way.
Adrian said 69% of organizations think they have too many analytics platforms. Data, he said, is also siled, and organizations maintain multiple relational databases. This leads to complexity; there is no single version of the truth and it becomes difficult to derive value from data from multiple data sources.
According to Adrian, using open standards encourages data sharing. “When we free up resources, we are able to do new things,” he added.
At Gartner The impacts of data ecosystems report, released in April, the analyst said data management is no longer entirely focused on relational data. “Documents, charts, time series, wide columns, key values, registers, and other targeted data stores all provide specific optimizations for different data types and different use cases,” the report’s authors wrote.
A data ecosystem is seen by many as an approach to pre-integrating data from different sources to streamline delivery and optimization to support business decision making.
This is how Legal and General Investment Management (LGIM), which also appeared on stage at Evolve 2023, used Cloudera. Wulstan Reeve, data market manager at LGIM, said the data team wants to deliver relevant data to the business and customers faster, but extracting the right data so people can access it is a complex task. Providing relevant data means frictionless access. Data, he said, must also be accessible in the format people need. Then there is the challenge people face in finding out what datasets are available, which requires data discovery. Data integrity and accountability are the other requirements that LGIM needed to consider.
To support the data strategy Defined by the company’s chief data officer, the team needed to specify the required capabilities of a data platform with the company’s technology strategy of cloud first. Stuart Toll, senior enterprise architect at LGIM, said time to market, integration time and skills were among the criteria used to evaluate data platform vendors. For Toll, while LGIM probably could have made any data platform work, he said “we are an asset management company”. “We buy where we can and only build to differentiate ourselves.”
This influenced the company’s data integration strategy. LGIM didn’t want to get into assembling a lot of tools, as explained by Matt Bannock, head of data engineering at LGIM. “I don’t think there are more bad tools on the market,” he said. “There are so many good players, but what matters is time to market.”
Bannock said that with some tools, IT departments need to spend time integrating data. “Being able to start working with the data, start running the computation, and start generating the output is much more valuable to us than the potential half percent advantage we could get if we created our own ecosystem,” said he declared. “There are a lot of benefits to buying into an ecosystem.”
While the company adopts best-of-breed tools where appropriate, it has adhered to the Cloudera ecosystem, which offers a data platform that supports hybrid environments as well as security, governance, and multi-data metadata management. unified clouds.
Gartner notes that data today is distributed, disparate and diverse. The experiences of data and analytics experts Gartner spoke to suggest that a significant integration effort is required to ensure that the IT system in which the data resides can operate seamlessly.
According to Gartner, the industry is beginning to respond, with cloud service and software providers developing more mature data ecosystems as the market shifts from “some assembly required” to a more integrated platform experience.
As LGIM has discovered, the level of integration now available means that IT teams can avoid doing much of the hard work stitching together these disparate data sources to provide a data marketplace for the enterprise.