APMdigest asked experts from across the IT industry — from analysts and consultants to users and the top vendors — for their opinions on the essential tools to support digital transformation. Part 5 is all about data.

Start with The Essential Tools to Support Digital Transformation - Part 1

Start with The Essential Tools to Support Digital Transformation - Part 2

Start with The Essential Tools to Support Digital Transformation - Part 3

Start with The Essential Tools to Support Digital Transformation - Part 4

CONTENT MANAGEMENT AND RECORD MANAGEMENT

Digital transformation presents opportunities to rethink and reinvent workflows, business processes, and customer service. Enterprise content management and records management provides instantaneous digital access to relevant information, with minimal effort. From a records management standpoint, built-for-purpose content services apps allows to integrate and manage information from previously isolated processes and silos –— meaning policies can now be applied to a much larger content pool. Policy application can now be automated, metadata and classifications are determined in the background, based on rules specific to the business process. Productivity and satisfaction increase as all this interconnected and analyzed content can now be surfaced in the right context across an organization's value chains and citizen-facing services.
Stephen Ludlow
Senior Director, Enterprise Product Marketing, OpenText

DATA PROCESSING

Digital transformation is a vague phrase with an unclear definition. One thing that is clear is the competitive value of being able to process and analyze the vast amount of data being generated by modern systems in a timely and effective manner. One must-have tool for harnessing this data is a fast and general engine for large-scale data processing. This tool provides high performance access to these dynamic but complex data collections, and provides interactive functionality which enables you to make better decisions more quickly and with a higher degree of confidence.
Jeremy Garcia
Manager, Community and Open Source Programs, Datadog

DATA INTEGRATION

The crux of Digital Transformation is to obtain competitive advantage or improve efficiencies through actionable analytics. Thanks to on-demand access to powerful, scalable technologies, the cloud is ideally suited to consolidate data sets for high performance, integrated analytics. With efficient, continuous integration of high volumes of data between numerous sources and targets such as cloud infrastructures and increasingly ubiquitous data lakes, real-time data integration technology is the key enabler for Digital Transformation. The efficient and secure movement of data between sources and targets will allow organizations to derive more value from their data.
Mark Van de Wiel
CTO, HVR

DATA MANAGEMENT

The tool that is able to search, enrich and create useful information out of the petabytes of data that is being generated is the most important tool for digital transformation.You need to make sure you can measure what your users are doing but also be able to monitor and improve your infrastructure. Everything from the hardware to the software and the user needs to stored and correlated to make sure you can make the right decision.
Coen Meerbeek
Online Performance Consultant and Founder of Blue Factory Internet

CLOUD DATA MANAGEMENT

An organization that is truly committed to digital transformation must face the reality that a traditional on-premises data center is very often not the best venue for many types of digital initiatives. Digital transformation, therefore, inevitably leads to federated operations and infrastructure. Tools that enable the management of data and operations in a cross-cloud, multi-cloud environment are essential to long-term success in digital transformation.
Serge Shats
CTO, JetStream Software

DATA STORAGE

We see data storage as being the most crucial in digital transformation. Clearly, the most appropriate data storage solution evolves over the stages of the data life cycle. Not all stages are equal between the ingest or creation to the obsolescence and deletion of the data. Most critical is the active storage phase when the storage solution needs to deliver high performance to serve end-users in real time, be scalable to grow with expanding data sizes, reliable so it overcomes temporary hardware deficiencies and most importantly, cost effective.
Pierre Evenou
CEO, Rozo Systems

FOCUS ON DATA

The most important factor to successful digital transformation is not a tool or technology, it's a mindset: an openness to putting data at the center of strategy and discovering the technologies best suited to transforming the business. Digital transformation must center around a data-driven opportunity. When companies force digital transformation, they often rush changes to one (or two) of three key factors: people, processes or technology. Therein lies the risk: change without sufficient focus on the data can cause a ripple effect of roadblocks and silos. A data-centric approach brings together the right people, practices and technologies –— such as analytics tools, AI and machine learning platforms, distributed application models, and in particular new data protection and management approaches –— to swiftly and safely dig out valuable insights from multiple data types and sources. In the coming years, new edge, core and cloud architectures will lead to data being even more distributed and dynamic than today. Digital transformation that's data-driven will enable real-time analysis at the edge and ensure the right data is being retained and protected for later decision making.
Mark Bregman
SVP and CTO, NetApp

Read The Essential Tools to Support Digital Transformation - Part 6, covering the development process.