The latest enterprise technology from EMC has the ability to truly unlock the promise of big data – fundamentally changing business models and revolutionising the organisation at its very core.
This is the view of Servaas Venter, Country Manager for Southern Africa at EMC. Speaking recently at IDC’s big data and Business Analytics Forum 2014, Venter said big data has moved from being purely a concept, to a reality
that is available to any organisation today.
“No longer is the conversation about merely the data itself – it’s about how everything around that data is changing, how you’re handling the explosion of data across the organisation.” Whether or not an organisation embraces it, Big
Data is changing the industry within which it operates, he adds.
Speaking alongside Venter at the event, IDC’s Country Manager for South Africa, Andries Lombaard, noted the rapid changes in recent years in the volume, velocity and variety of data entering the organisation.
“This is enabling information-driven decisions – not just for executives at a strategic level, but for every level of the organisation at tactical and operational levels as well.”
“Looking more broadly, at all the possibilities big data analytics holds, it can truly change the way we look at the world, not just the way we do business,” he said.
EMC’s Venter referred to examples such as Uber: the mobile app-centered taxi company taking the world by storm. Overlaying social data and geospatial data, Uber tracks where taxis are, and picks up consumer behaviour in real-
time – connecting the closest driver to customers. “This is a very clever use of data; and because of this, Uber is quickly becoming a market leader in a very short space of time.”
Similar to the way Uber has rocked the metered taxi industry, Nike is shaking up the sports apparel industry, reinventing and broadening itself as a wearable technology pioneer. “It pulls users into communities that are energised by
all the data being generated – creating a richer experience for the customer, and greater loyalty levels for Nike.”
EMC refers to this paradigm shift as ‘the 3rd platform’ of IT architecture.
The first platform, which started about 50 years ago with the migration of paper-based processing to mainframe terminals, gave way to the second platform – LAN-based traditional client/server enterprise architecture.
“Now, we entering a new era,” explained Venter. “The third platform heralds massive changes in application development. Web-scale, object-oriented IT is being delivered, drawing on the latest in the fields of big data, Mobility, Social
Media and Cloud-based architecture.”
Today’s CIO expects to consume IT as an application, with a simplified support model running in the background. The Vblock federation of converged infrastructure aims to address this, he added.
IDC’s Lombaard said research indicates that 83% of South African corporates recognise big data has the potential to power better decision-making.
“Depending on the organisation in question, the benefits are multi-fold – improving dialogue with customers, re-developing products, customising solutions in realtime, reducing maintenance costs, enabling better data security of data,
and many more.”
To capitalise on these opportunities, EMC pulls together all of its subsidiary assets into unified client propositions. The core business of EMC is complemented by Pivotal (SAAS developers), RSA (Security specialists) and VMWare
(providing the hypervisor and virtualisation stack). The latest iterations of EMC’s Isilon, VNX and VMAX ranges are joined by XtremIO – a flash-array offering unprecedented application performance simplicity – and making big data a
reality.
“Today it is possible to be managing 90 petabytes of data with, let’s say, half an employee,” noted Venter.
With the right technology, the organisation can start to identify opportunities to leverage big data, redeploy IT staff to address any skills gaps, decide which new data sources to integrate, and meld the big data framework into
existing security policies.
Ultimately, the organisation evolves to the point of complete business process re-engineering, Venter explained, adding that this process remains fluid, as the organisation continually innovates and stays agile.
