Unlock your data

There’s an endless stream of data cycling through the world.

What customers buy, what they like, what they don’t – all of that information can be instantly available to a business. But data has no value on its own. It needs to be cross-referenced with other datasets and interpreted quickly so your business can put the insights to use. And if your data-management strategy doesn’t allow you to do that, there’s a problem. Glenn McPherson, managing director of NetApp Australia and New Zealand, reveals why having a vision for your business data is crucial.

How has the way we think about data changed?

Data has always been used by businesses to create new business or a new product or improvement. What’s changing is accessibility. You can assess large volumes of data at once and therefore businesses have the ability to analyse it at great depths really quickly. It’s a very disruptive or exciting time, depending on your point of view.

What does the ability to access and analyse data mean for businesses, day to day?

In the past, when information flow was a lot slower, you had more time to respond. It took a while for competitors to come in and offer something better than what incumbent suppliers were offering. Now, you have to continually disrupt your own business to be relevant in the marketplace. We can access information so readily and make decisions so quickly in a way that we couldn’t a year ago, much less 20 years ago.

What are some ways businesses have used data analysis to their advantage?

Hotel and resort marketer and operator Mantra Group is applying a data-centric approach to managing hotel room utilisation. Mantra is able to use the speed and performance of its platform to ensure that room utilisation is optimised without oversubscribing. Data mobility also means that if customers are looking for rooms on sites such as Wotif or Expedia, it can help provide real-time room availability and pricing based on how many people are looking.

Online bank ING DIRECT has been using data-management techniques for real-time monitoring to spot trends and react to market changes. Rather than having a generic set of products it hopes will work, the bank uses a data-driven approach to develop new products that respond to consumer demand. ING can get these solutions to market fast and assess their effectiveness quickly.

Are there insights that companies have gained from breaking down data silos?

It’s so far-ranging, from improving a product line to completely disrupting industries – Airbnb, for example, is now the largest “hotel” in the world and it doesn’t have any capital. CoreLogic RP Data, which provides property information across Australia and New Zealand, has turned data into valuable insights for its customers. Every day, it takes in over 130 feeds of property data and imagery to create more than 500 million property decision points. These help real estate agents, home owners, investors and government organisations make informed property and financial decisions.

Many businesses now have the ability to bring datasets together, where and when they need them to create better business value. For example, Telstra has recently launched an offering called Telstra Virtual Storage, which is based on NetApp’s data fabric approach. It provides customers with the agility to securely manage data across both private (on a customer’s premises) and public cloud properties, as they require or desire, on a flexible consumption model.

Are businesses that aren’t leveraging their data being left behind?

If you’re not leveraging data, that’s not to say you won’t be successful – but you’ll possibly be trumped by others using these capabilities and you might not see it coming. We’re giving customers the ability to be custodians of their data so no matter where their data is, whether it’s in the cloud or an on-premise data centre or with a specialist service provider, they have access and control.

What key trends do you see on the horizon?

Businesses are becoming much more application-focused and it’s important we have software-enabled solutions that allow our customers to accelerate their business outcomes. NetApp recently introduced a next-generation set of data-centre tools called hyper-converged infrastructure. It intelligently scales up and down and guarantees performance and capacity for each application that is running. For example, a demanding stock-trading application that requires very fast response times does not impact the responsiveness of the sales reporting platform that a business needs to run continuously. We’re also offering it to customers on a consumption model where they only pay for what they use.

Everything we’re doing now is with data fabric in mind. Think of it as an imaginary thread of data going through all of your core IT assets. We really want to help customers change their world with data and therefore we need to give them control. So every technology we innovate must have that capability.