42
XXX XXX
OPINION
"To use analytics to resolve complex business
questions, companies must be able to leverage
all data throughout their corporate ecosystem
with minimal friction. "
across a variety of sources into a succinct, seamless
tapestry. It can provide new insights into customer
interactions with the business over multiple channels.
It can provide a clear picture of how to boost sales or
prevent defection to rivals.
Data fabric software orchestrates query execution
across multiple processing engines and repositories,
including Hadoop and data warehouses, in an
optimised and secure manner. By taking advantage
of a data fabric that stretches across multiple
systems, organisations can gain the flexibility to
choose their data repositories, analytic engines, data
treatment strategies and workload characteristics. In
short they can put their business needs first.
Practical answers
In a practical sense, these benefits would present
themselves to retailers, for example, by granting
them new insight into their customers and driving
incremental revenue. By streaming web events from
an online store in Hadoop and crafting a dynamic
view of customer interactions in the enterprise data
warehouse, including individual profitability, purchase
and campaign history, analytics can be built to detect
high-value users with a transaction problem in real
time, allowing the right assistance to be offered as
needed, while at the same time creating a complete
picture of that customer’s journey.
Alternatively, a manufacturing company would
benefit from data fabric technology through the
efficient use of incoming sensor data to carry out
proactive maintenance for production machinery
to reduce costs, increase customer satisfaction and
even safety standards. By incorporating, for example,
vehicle sensor data into a discovery engine connected
to an enterprise data warehouse holding sales,
dealer, plant and parts data, a car maker can craft an
analytics model to leverage smart time series analysis
to reveal the likely cause of part failures. It can
then connect this insight to the sensor events that
forewarned of the parts failures and trace that back
to the root cause in the supply chain, thus offering
the right corrective procedure, to the right vehicle
owner, at the right time.
With big data technology gaining traction
generally, organisations operating on any part of
the business spectrum can secure massive benefits
from adding data fabric technology to a cohesive
and uninterrupted analytic ecosystem. Big data
analytics is driving forward organisations from all
sectors, though just acquiring the data will not be
enough to see real results. To use analytics to resolve
complex business questions, companies must be
able to leverage all data throughout their corporate
ecosystem with minimal friction.
All the capacity and data architecture in the
world will get you little more than chaos without
an orchestration layer to weave that data together
across multiple systems and processes it in
meaningful ways.
Data fabric technology gives organisations
seamless access to data and analytics across all
systems, including data warehouses and Hadoop
data lakes, fusing the data without the need for
IT professionals to use special tools or learn a
completely new language. From manufacturing to
retail and beyond, companies can be assured that
pushing this emerging technology to centre stage will
help them to take full control and derive maximum
advantage of their data.
www.networkseuropemagazine.com