THE SMARTER CONNECTIVITY IMPERATIVE FOR DATA-DRIVEN ENTERPRISES

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Q&A WITH VETERAN ANALYSTMIKE FERGUSON

WHAT ARE THE DATA IMPLICATIONS WITH TODAY’S DIGITAL TRANSFORMATIONS?

Digitization – or as we mostly see it today, digital transformation – can enable businesses to take

advantage of data in new ways that drive greater efficiencies, reduce costs, streamline business

processes, and lead to competitive advantage from more impactful and actionable insights.

But a side effect of most data-driven journeys is the enormity of the data management challenge.

In an increasingly fragmented data environment, organizations are grappling with scale complexity

as the velocity, volume, and variety of data continue to rise. That complexity includes increasing

numbers of unstructured and structured sources, multiple types of data stores both on-premises

and in multiple clouds – and a growing need to operate in real-time.

Digital transformation – and the aspiration to achieve it drives the need for smarter and simpler

data connectivity. Finding ways to easily access data in an incredibly (and increasingly) fragmented

landscape has become a high priority for almost every company in every industry, including those

with significant enterprise application portfolios.

WHERE IS THIS DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION COMPLEXITYHAPPENING TODAY?

There are five key components driving data and therefore, digital transformation complexity – cloud,

mobile, social, IoT and B2B process integration.

• Today’s enterprises typically run applications and store data in hybrid computing environments.

This requires IT departments/technical teams to deploy and configure connectivity solutions for

every single data source and business application across distributed environments.

• With mobile computing becoming ubiquitous, there are now APIs sitting on top of every

application and the need for pervasive data access for users to access information anywhere,

and at any time.

• Customer-centric organizations are seeking to leverage Big Data on social platforms as that’s

where their customers are congregating. Accessing and analyze the troves of unstructured social

media data is no easy feat.

• With the rise of Internet-of-Things (IoT), there are potentially thousands and millions of data

sources that need to be accessed and analyzed at the edge and in the enterprise. This is also

driving demand to analyze live streaming data in real-time.

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WHICH AREAS ARE YOU SEEING THE MOST INNOVATION WITH DATA-DRIVEN ENTERPRISES?

• Finally, as enterprises seek to integrate, automate and streamline B2B processes across digital

supply chains, the joining of applications and business processes is generating a much faster

movement of data between suppliers, partners and customers.

One of the fastest growing areas of digital transformation is the front office and the growing trend

toward self-service: A Zendesk survey found that 75% of consumers view self-service as a convenient

way to address customer service.

Innovations in digital front-office operations such as eCommerce applications and customer service

apps have replaced the need for customers to interact directly with employees. These digital

channels generate tremendous volumes of customer interaction data and drive a greater need for

improving customer engagement and experience on these channels.

As a result, businesses are investing in new customer-intelligence applications and seeking faster

access to low latency data, insights and recommendations about customers and their behaviors.

They also need to respond quickly to meet the expectations of today’s informed, demanding digital

customer.

Source: Intelligent Business Strategies

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Digital Channel are generating big data

Need to Improve customer engagement

Customers

Front-Office OperationE-commerceapplication

M-commerceMobile apps

Social commerceapplication

Sales Forceautomation apps

Customer facing brick & mortar apps

Customer Service apps

Application/System data

Customer

data

Customer Employee

Application/System

app UI

WHAT ARE THE REQUIREMENTS FOR CAPTURING ANDLEVERAGING ALL THIS SELF-SERVICE CUSTOMER DATA?

True customer understanding requires the ability to produce a much richer set of integrated

customer data from traditional, machine generated and customer generated digital data sources

and then to re-analyze this to produce more accurate, personalized insights and recommendations

across all channels. This enables companies to implement an omni-channel approach to customer

treatment. Different business units spanning marketing, finance and distribution are all seeking

to capture, integrate and analyze customer interactions across all channels for deeper customer

insights and to drive value.

Beyond identity data (master data), it means gaining insights into customer behavior. This requires

analyzing online, location and product usage data, as well as transactional data such as what a

customer purchased and from where, and social media interactions for sentiment analysis and to

gain knowledge about the household. Businesses want to have all of this data integrated for timely

analysis.

HOW ARE BUSINESSES ANALYZING ALL OF THESE NEW DATA TYPES AND SOURCES?

With the explosion of new data coming in from a myriad of sources, organizations are now using

different platforms optimized for different analytical workloads – spanning MDM, advanced

analytics, self-service BI and analytic tools and real-time streaming analytics – as part of an analytical

ecosystem.

Big Data analytical workloads have resulted in multiple platforms now being used for analytical processing

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Source: Intelligent Business Strategies

Real-timestreaminganalytics &

decision m’gmt

Graph analysisInvestigative / Exploratory

analysis

Self-service BI & Analytical Tools

Data mining, model

development

IT developed queries, reports & dashboards

Data mining, model

development

Streaminganalytics Advanced

Analytics (multi-structured

data)

DW & marts

mart

Prod

Asset

Cust

R

D

UCEDW

Advanced Analytics(structured data)

MDM

Streamingdata

NoSQLDBMS

NoSQL Graph DB

Cloudstorage

Hadoopdata store

Data WarehouseRDBMS

Analytical RDBMS

Master data

DWAppliance

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YOU’VE LAID OUT SIGNIFICANT DATA CHALLENGES. HOW CAN BUSINESSES BEGIN TO SIMPLIFY DATA CONNECTIVITY?

Furthermore, the deluge of data being ingested into multiple types of data stores has created the

need for offering the entire analytical ecosystem in the cloud or as a hybrid setup.

A fundamental challenge with multiple analytical systems is greater complexity is pushed onto self-

service BI users. They now have to understand connectivity to all relevant data stores. Today’s BI

tools are shipping with more and more connectors which exposes every user to more connectivity

and data integration complexity – a hinderance for businesses to be becoming more agile and

productive.

Clearly, in our increasingly complex distributed data landscape, it’s getting harder to keep pace with

all of these data sources and to even know what to connect to.

Today’s digital enterprises need a smarter way to get to data much more quickly and to know

where it is - in a hybrid and rapidly changing environment. This requires simplifying connectivity by

addressing these fundamental questions:

• How do you find the data you/your business user needs?

• How do you simplify access?

• How many more sources do you need to connect to?

• How do you detect changes that impact how to connect to data?

• How do you connect to and access data across the edge, the cloud and the data center?

Despite widespread innovation in analytics and big data processing – the way businesses access

data and understand its value hasn’t changed much for over a decade … until now.

The good news is that new innovations are empowering organizations to connect information

systems and sources faster, more reliably, and with less burden on your internal teams. Magnitude

and their Simba team of experts are addressing this problem with new data connectivity solutions to

eliminate the fragmented effort of data source driver acquisition and maintenance today.

Learn more about Simba connectivity solutions including connectors (drivers), our SDK and our

integration and certification services. Find out about the latest innovation, Magnitude Gateway, and

how your organization can gain immediate value from delivering unified data access without heavy

implementation and maintenance overhead.

Request a demo: connectivity@magnitude.com or call +1 604.633.0008.

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You can also watch a special episode of The Briefing Room, where Mike Ferguson and our General

Manager of Connectivity, Tony Fisher, share their perspectives on why a smarter approach to data

connectivity is a requisite for success in the Information Economy.

About Intelligent Business Strategies

Intelligent Business Strategies is an independent IT analyst, consulting and education company

specialising in business intelligence, analytics, information management and business integration to

build the Smart Business.

Founded in 1992, the company offers business and technical excellence and quality with highly

experienced analysts and consultants who work with both commercial users of technology and with

technology vendors.

Expertise includes big data technologies, data lakes, data management platforms, data integration,

machine learning, analytical databases, real-time event processing and decision management.

Simba is the industry choice for standards-based data access and analytics solutions, and for innovation in data connectivity. Our reputation as the connectivity pioneer means we’re the preferred partner for SDKs – ODBC and JDBC – and our technology is embedded into today’s most popular BI and analytics applications. A subsidiary of Magnitude Software, the unified data application management leader, Simba provides connectivity solutions that are pivotal to the vast operational efficiencies delivered bythe Magnitude portfolio of products.

©2018 Magnitude Software, Inc. All rights reserved. Magnitude Software is a registered trademark of Magnitude Software, Inc. in the U.S. and other countries. Simba is a trademark of Simba Technologies, Inc. All other product and company names mentioned herein are used for identification purposes only and may be trademarks of their respective owners in the U.S. and other countries. WP-MF_042019

To learn more, contact: +1 604 633 0008 | connectivity@magnitude.com | simba.com