Enterprises must have a technology direction

Usha Prasad

One of the leading areas today in information management, that concerns customers, is in the area of data integration. It it is one of the fastest growing markets and there's no doubt about it.

Data integrity is a part of an overall information integration strategy. The strategy overall is for information integration. One of the by-products of having an information integration strategy is having data integrity. So, data integrity is a core, it is having the basics in place, says Kaushik Bagchi, Country Manager, Information Management, IBM Software Group, India.

"The technology problems faced by companies, emerging or large, is quite similar. However, in large organizations, the magnitude of the problem might be bigger," says Kaushik.

"The advantage with a smaller start-up company, which is building and growing in size, is that they have lesser amount of legacy to manage. In fact, emerging enterprises should be looking more at these technologies even to start off because they can avoid such problems moving forward. They can leapfrog the technology latency which the large ones cannot, because they have been for a long time and have already invested in technology," he adds.

If you look at why data integrity is important is that people have deployed multiple applications and you find different data types available with the customer across different applications and this is nothing new," says Kaushik.

Highlighting on the problems faced by customers in preserving data integrity, he highlights three critical points - there are customers who have deployed ERP systems, CRM and even home grown applications. But the quality of data that exists across these multiple applications is in question because when the data was captured they did not envisage what was expected out of the data few years down the line. This is one of the primary concerns.

When the data exists across multiple applications, it is difficult to find out which version of the data was the current one and the most correct and relevant one. This is another critical problem, he notes.

The third one is, with rapid change in technology you have to be able to connect to multiple data repositories to be able to find them out and then transform them into a form which can be accessed and used whenever you want. This is very critical, says Kaushik.

"Though these are the critical areas, integration requirements for data is going to be there. Whether it is a large enterprise or a SMB, they should look for technology direction and it is one of the areas where you spend a lot of money," he adds.

Why it is even more important for a start up or a growing company is that they have to focus on building an infrastructure for data integrity. Unless they invest on a framework which will help them move those scales of pains tomorrow, they will reinvent the same pain structure which others have gone through, Kaushik explains.

When an emerging enterprise, with a vision to grow big, talks of data integrity, it is important to realize that the data too will grow real time along with the company's growth. And implementation of technologies which ensures data quality, data integrity across multiple systems and which ensures that your data is available on-demand all the time is very important, he says.

"If you have data across multiple locations, you need to look at whether you have the infrastructure which supports real time connectivity. Today, if you are unable to remove x volumes of data and if you don't take corrective measures now, it can actually become a big deterrent to your growth," Kaushik cautions.

Growing enterprises need real time data access

He further adds that if enterprises are not able to leverage on their data it becomes a big problem. It is very critical that people who have fast growing plans, like - launching new strategies; reach out to new customers; trying to grow very fast; going through acquisitions and mergers - require real time data access. If you don't exchange data on real time, things don't work.

So, if you want to partner, grow and offer new services to newer markets, the bare minimum necessity is that your data integrity is in place and you can scale as and when you want in terms of access to data resource. This is very very critical, says Kaushik

Once you have established clean data, it does not solve your full purpose. All it gives you is a clean data and if you have to access the data from multiple applications on real time, then you have to integrate them, he adds. "It is also about the ability to build a framework and then integrate data and deliver it as a service."

You should have access to the right data and clean data as and when you want and from wherever you want. This is actually what information integration is all about, and data integrity is obviously the key requirement for that, he says.

As a vendor, IBM has an entire breadth of portfolio of offerings which help SMBs start from scratch and depending upon the level of maturity one want to reach at any given point of time, it we implement multiple solutions, informs Kaushik.