Economic pressures compounded by the pandemic mean businesses are fighting for relevancy – and channel partners are perfectly poised to help them fight back.

By Doug Woolley, MD of Dell Technologies South Africa

Today, an organisation’s competitive advantage is directly determined by how rapidly it turns data into the meaningful insights that drive business outcomes. Their destiny lies in their data – and how that is managed is critical.

But there’s a challenge. In the so-called data decade, when data is expected to hit 175ZB worldwide by 2025, less than 0.5% of the world’s data is actually being analysed. There is a surplus of dark data. The reality is that while organisations amass ever more data, this growth rate is exceeding their ability to truly harness the insights. Over a third of IT decision makers regard “sourcing, gathering, managing and governing data as it grows” as one of their biggest challenges, according to a Forrester study from 2019.

There’s no doubt that enterprises grasp the importance of access to quality data – that it is the spark that will ignite better business experiences. But channel partners have a role to play in helping their customers to grow that understanding into a fully formed, proactive strategy. Helping customers to realise the full potential of their data will give them the competitive edge – and guide smarter investments. In every industry, emerging technologies are disrupting and reinventing the ways people expect to interact, with increasingly empowered consumers demanding more data-rich, personalised experiences.

These changes bring rich opportunities. There is no shortage of competing projects and priorities for businesses, but with many projects being put on hold due to economic uncertainty, picking the right areas to advance is critical. This is where the channel comes in. The channel can help customers to truly embrace their digital futures with business-critical consultancy on how to prioritise and make the right call on investments.  In turn, they would be able to accelerate the cycle of innovation and create competitive differentiation, if they re-focus and commit to conquering three key challenges.

 

Data Management Consultancy: Dealing with dark, distributed and diverse data

Unfortunately, today’s data management approaches are ill-equipped to meet the needs of the data era. For example, businesses will have to rethink current approaches to data siloes as we move away from centralised data strategies. This is being driven by increasingly distributed data as IoT technologies fuel edge computing. Every second, 127 new IoT devices connect to the internet and Gartner predicts that 75% of all enterprise-generated data will be created and stored at the edge by 2025. As the number of edge locations generating data grows, centralised data strategies that transfer distributed data to the cloud simply won’t be able to keep up with the real-time demands. Understanding the limitations of vendors’ infrastructure and keeping up with business needs, will be vital for channel partners as they seek to support vendors’ journeys towards more digitally agile environments. It requires a change in mindset, as well as infrastructure in order to keep up with the data deluge.

Meanwhile, as alluded to previously businesses face the problem of dark data – with the majority of stored data not driving any business outcomes. Dark data and its prolific growth demonstrate the ongoing struggle to harness the value of data. Add to this predicament the new demand for real-time data set to spice up data management over the next 5 – 10 years. According to Forrester research, analysts predict that between 2019 and 2024, enterprises will triple their unstructured data stored as file or object. With data use becoming more sophisticated the spotlight is well and truly on data management.

This growing complexity has implications for regulatory and security compliance – something that many vendors will require support on. In an increasingly connected world with edge computing locations multiplying there is an increased surface for attack – which we have certainly seen exploited this year through the pandemic with switch to homeworking. This makes it more important than ever for enterprises to stay on top of compliance. As the goal posts change, channel consultancy is critical – expertise in proactive cyber resilience plays a key role in helping customers assess risk of attack. In turn, partners can build stronger customer relationships.

Channel partners have an opportunity here to help vendors address the data deluge with a major re-think, transforming data management for the data era by taking on a few key actions. Firstly, democratising business data so that teams can easily find and access the high-quality, production-ready data sets they need to do their roles. Secondly, giving data engineers and data scientists easy access to the tools they need to deliver valuable business insights. And finally, deploying and managing data, applications and infrastructure in a consistent way across the entire IT landscape.

 

Helping vendors take innovation to the edge

Gartner predicts that by 2022, more than 50% of enterprise data will be created and processed outside the data centre or cloud, up from less than 10% in 2019. Going forward, most data will be generated at the edge to be processed in real-time, spawning a new era of innovation the likes of which we’ve never seen. Smart vehicles will become autonomous, telehealth will remove barriers to healthcare and digital cities will enhance the lives of billions. And guiding vendors through this evolution will require specialist, sector knowledge – partners must know the ins and outs of their sectors in order to really tailor that guidance and make an impact on business outcomes.

As data’s centre of gravity rapidly turns towards the edge, IT is delivering more and more of these real-time, quality-of-service, fraction-of-a-second functions in decentralised locations. Organisations are recognising that it’s not always practical to transfer distributed data to centralised infrastructure in a data centre or public cloud, in order to process and analyse the data in a timely way. Instead moving infrastructure closer to edge locations where the data is being generated and needs to be acted upon is key. This raises fresh questions of how to achieve a consistent infrastructure and data management approach across core to multiple cloud providers and large number of edge locations – and the challenge continues.

The reality is that there is no one-size fits all solution, but businesses can go some way to combatting these challenges. As between 80 – 100 per cent of edge computing infrastructure is deployed through the channel, it is important that partners are on hand to provide the right advice. For example, creating a single operational hub from the core and hybrid cloud out to the edge and connecting it to an increasingly pervasive number of devices will help to reinforce consistent data management. Ensuring that a consistent development environment is maintained in which to build, run and manage modern apps.

 

People power: Supporting vendors’ culture

To reap the full value of business data, time needs to be applied to data innovation and monetisation. Yet according to Gartner, only 22% of data management teams’ time is actually spent on these areas. Firstly, this highlights an urgent need for a cultural reset, reinstating the value of innovation as a business-critical function that must be prioritised, cultivated and celebrated. This might be a soft area in terms of sales, but unless the vendor has the right team, culture and structure in place the tech will fall flat.

This also shines a light on the mix of the many teams and individuals that often work with an organisation’s data – often representing different parts of an organisation with a unique set of objectives. A scattered approach to data teams makes it difficult to provide a focused and co-ordinated approach to data management. If channel partners can impress the importance of holistic business unity, setting expectations from the get-go they stand more chance of watching their vendor flourish.

Throwing more Data Scientists at this problem isn’t the answer. Most organisations are missing the key data roles and skill sets they need to become an Intelligent Business. Data Scientists are highly skilled, highly specialised and in short supply, so they are a rare and expensive resource in most organisations. This makes the efficient use of their time even more important. And while this might not fall within the channel sales job role it impresses the importance of fostering a strong partner relationship with vendors. The provision of trusted industry advice is invaluable and the ability to influence smarter business decisions is key. They need to encourage businesses to ask how much of their Data Scientists’ time is actually spent on the Data Science tasks that deliver high value to their company, as opposed to being distracted with other responsibilities and tasks?

Once these three challenges are addressed, vendors will be able to adapt to emerging technologies and consumer trends — and their successes will be shared. With the right infrastructure, data management strategy and people in place, any business can thrive in the data era – but they must be united in their desire for innovation if they want to uncover the true value of their data.