Organisations that adopt Big Data in 2013 will create value and competitive differentiation, while those which do not will stagnate.
EMC A/NZ channels general manager, Brett Harris, said this is because the speed at which the world is changing means that “gut feel and experience are no longer sufficient to make good decisions”.
“The amount of intelligence being shared though social, mobile and device data will present new opportunities and new insights that need to be exploited by organisations, in order to remain competitive,” he said.
The opportunity for IT to create value then lies in the use of available data, irrespective of size, type, or how quickly it is generated, to support decisions being made and enhance interactions, will be.
From a channel perspective, Harris said customers must now be offered choice in their delivery.
“IT as a service is a major area of growth and those businesses which embrace this direction will lead the industry,” he said.
EMC’s Velocity Partner Program is expected to reflect this mindset, with the vendor announcing plans to offer even greater incentives to its channel partners and more than double the size of our reseller channel for Cloud services in 2013.
Harris said EMC is keeping a close on the market and aims to bring “radical new technologies” to market which exploit capabilities of the basic components, such as multi-core processors and flash based storage.
“These innovations will accelerate the transformation of IT infrastructures and power Australian Cloud providers,” he said.
The Big Data market is also squarely in EMC’s sights, with the vendor assisting organisations in leveraging their information and deploying real-time analytics.
Harris said 2013 is a key year for Big Data, as he expects the analytics discussion to take root with IT professionals around the world.
“Not as something that they have to deliver to the business, but as a toolset they can use to better run their own businesses,” he said.
“It will inevitably start with the security community, but it won't be long before the other disciplines such as infrastructure, applications, and user experience, start to appreciate the power of a good predictive model.”
Crowd dynamics
2012 may be over, but when probed about whether anything happened to a greater extent than EMC initially predicted, Harris highlights two areas.
In the security space, the vendor saw a bigger-than-anticipated change in attitude towards cyber security.
“Organisations are now willing to discuss and collaborate with each other, rather than being secretive and embarrassed,” Harris said.
Then there was the change in thinking of traditional enterprise companies, evident in their embracing of open-source technology and crowd sourcing.
“For example, EMC open-sourced its Analytics Workbench to allow anyone to download and use it,” Harris said.
“We also linked up with Kaggle, a crowd-sourced Data Scientist movement.”
Patrick Budmar covers consumer and enterprise technology breaking news for IDG Communications. Follow Patrick on Twitter at @patrick_budmar.
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