Today, organizations need data-driven insights to advance decision making at all levels and digital transformation is a key component of those efforts. Supporting data-driven insights and digital transformation takes an ever-growing range of services, products, and tools from forward-thinking companies that are working to help their customers deliver the right insights to the right people at the right time.
Whether helping to react faster to trends, create timely products and services, or enable rapid fraud detection, the availability of better access to fresh, high-quality data delivers competitive advantage. Some of the new approaches being embraced to help drive greater benefit from data are DevOps and DataOps, data quality and governance initiatives, hybrid and multi-cloud architectures, IoT and edge computing, and a range of next-gen databases.
The message has been clear for some time, but the last year and a half has provided even more evidence of the need to understand what is happening in real time and, if possible, even anticipate future events. Still difficulties persist, which need to be overcome.
For example, a recent survey conducted by Flatfile found that more than three-quarters of respondents either “sometimes or often” run into problems onboarding data. Overall, 90% of respondents must transfer data from one system to another at some point. The survey revealed that data onboarding is increasingly routine, with 50% of respondents citing data onboarding as a daily activity. Another 28% said onboarding is done weekly and 22% reported that they have to onboard data multiple times per day.
Another survey conducted by Experian also revealed that 84% of respondents say there has been more demand for data insights in their organizations during the COVID-19 pandemic. The report found that most companies did not need to start brand-new data initiatives since data projects had been in the works for years, but had just lacked the prioritization to move forward strongly. With the greater focus on data, the Experian report pointed out, there is a need for greater investment in hiring talent with expertise in both data and data management tools, the use of more automated processes, the selection of the right technologies, and the development of data literacy programs.
Digital transformation is a goal being embraced steadily, according to a study of IT professionals produced by Unisphere Research and sponsored by Aerospike. The majority (78%) of respondents’ organizations have digital transformation budgets. This number jumps to 94% among organizations with 5,000 or more employees. The top digital transformation projects being undertaken by organizations right now are cloud solutions (73%), BI and data analytics (55%), and cybersecurity (42%). In addition, a notable number of survey respondents reported IoT and machine learning/AI projects, 30% and 29%, respectively.
To support organizations in navigating through new challenges and a rapidly evolving big data ecosystem, Big Data Quarterly presents the 2021 “Big Data 50,” a list of companies driving innovation and expanding what is possible in terms of collecting, storing, and extracting value from data. The list is wide-ranging, with some companies that are long-time industry leaders and continue to innovate at a rapid pace, and others that are newer arrivals on the data management and analytics scene.
We encourage you to go beyond the brief descriptions in this special report and explore these companies by visiting their websites. In addition, on the pages following the Big Data 50 list, under the Trailblazers header, executives share perspectives on their companies’ unique approaches to driving innovation.
You can also gain more insight into important market trends about how data is being managed, consumed, and leveraged by accessing Unisphere Research’s survey reports at www.unisphereresearch.com and an extensive library of white papers at www.dbta.com/DBTA-Downloads/WhitePapers.