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Build the right IT infrastructure to harness the power of analytics

Enterprises require an approach towards a better IT infrastructure coupled with the power of analytics

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Soma Tah
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Viswanath Ramaswamy

Viswanath Ramaswamy

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Big data rightfully is considered as a “natural resource” today. It is being put to its maximum use in order to predict consumer behavior and demand and to earn consumer loyalty. Thus, developing to become a business relevant tool.

Nevertheless, data alone is not sufficient to address business problems. The crux of the issue is to glean insight from the data in order to make better business decisions. For this purpose infrastructure can improve significantly, providing the much needed agility and make the business more result driven. In other words, IT infrastructure becomes the backbone of an enterprise which requires to optimize its business for which it depends on -the questions and the answers on what they support.

It is important to focus on the insights that you want to generate from the data and not just on the data itself. Bringing a variety of data types together provides greater context for decision making. For instance, to illicit information which are usually associated with “what”, “when”, “how many” – the relational database or transactional type system is sufficient. However, in order to answer a more in depth, subjective type questions which revolve around “why”, we need to look at the unstructured text analytics which resembles a maze and therefore challenging.

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The demand for a more streamlined analytics of unstructured data, which no more serve as operational, has seen the evolution of better integrated analytics made possible with smarter IT infrastructure. Hence it becomes imperative on the part of the company to bring the business team, the data team and the infrastructure team on the same page to drive the most effective transformation.

The growth story of analytics has seen it from being descriptive to predictive and now acquiring cognitive abilities. The industry leaders also acknowledge that without Analytics a strong IT infrastructure is hollow and vice-versa. An effective analytics journey for an enterprise includes greater integration of data across the enterprise, the ability to bring together diverse data types and  multiple analytic capabilities together to process that data. These factors suggest that the right infrastructure can enable greater speed and business impact from big data and analytics projects.

In this increasingly complex environment, core business systems and consumer systems are both vital to businesses and cannot run on independent paths. CIOs and IT Architects need to evaluate their IT infrastructure in light of the need for integration of these two types of business systems and based on the growing criticality of customer-facing systems. This can be achieved through a smarter approach to the IT, but not forgetting the driver in mind – data.

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The world will generate 35 zetabytes of data by 2020, thus highlighting how Data is growing exponentially and analytics are more important than ever. To make the enterprises of today, and make it ready for tomorrow, we would require an approach towards a better IT infrastructure coupled with the power of analytics.

Infrastructure designed for data-centric computing with good in-memory and IO-based computing capabilities can enable enterprises gain business transformation. The improved Power8 system technology has been designed for meeting the demands of such computing, in order to to provide flexibility and choice for organizations of all sizes to turn massive volumes of raw data into actionable business 50 times faster.

Similarly, flash technologies will enable enterprises  manage the workloads better, besides reducing storage space for high input/output operations per second (IOPS) workloads.

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Infrastructure really matters.  be it on premise or off premise, as enterprises are increasingly

depending on good quality of service as it is responsible for engaging their clients and customers and to give them exceptional experience. Also, it has to provide the enterprisers record of transaction. Thus, in order to strengthening the IT infrastructure by integrating systems of engagement and system of record has given way to more sophisticated infrastructure blueprints.

The choice one makes in IT infrastructure can make a big difference in not only being able to easily and cost effectively deliver solutions today, but also as you look towards building a balanced and optimized infrastructure to carry your organization into.

The author is country manager – Power Systems, IBM India and South Asia

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