PHASE 2: Realignment

What does it mean and what role does data play?

Cost containment and budget cuts are necessary to ensure that a business survives. But relying on these reductions alone will not allow an organization to emerge from the recession in good health.  Cuts have to be matched with a commitment to increasing business value and optimizing return on investment (ROI) on every piece of expenditure. In such an environment, reducing time to value will be a pivotal part of keeping businesses moving forward.

With many businesses realigning to turn their focus to squeezing maximum value from existing projects, data will come further into the spotlight. Tougher market conditions will raise new questions from employees and departments that haven’t previously worked with data. All of this means that data stacks will have to be ready to meet the demand and rise to the challenge.

How can Exasol help?

1. Get complete visibility amid market disruption

Your business will have to contend with uncertainty in many areas throughout the course of a recession. Smart use of data and analytics will be essential to plotting a path through unpredictable supply and demand, disrupted supply chains, fluctuating consumer confidence and changing behavior.

We give you the scope to optimize and extend your data platforms to provide the 360 view that is needed to steer your business to safety. Our open integration framework is designed to give you the smartest and most extensible Loading...analytics database available. Along with multi-platform and deployment support, our virtual schemas give you the flexibility to connect and analyze data from more sources than ever before at scale.

2. Reduce time to value

Many organizations will be working with larger volumes of data in an effort to make more informed, effective decisions. But there’s a big difference between this and having access to the right insights at the right time. That’s why reducing time to value is just as important as other considerations designed to improve TCO, such as lowering maintenance and infrastructure costs.

Our analytics database is alone in having Loading...in-memory processing ingrained in its core architecture. This means that you can work with larger volumes of data and continue to benefit from significantly faster access times. On top of this, the Massively Parallel Processing (Loading...MPP) capabilities of Exasol will help you to scale, with our cluster technology installed across multiple machines, all working in parallel to answer a query without a significant performance overhead. Not only does this allow you to optimize the ROI on existing projects, it means you can perform more complex analytics and lay the foundations for scaling and democratizing data in the future.

3. Make smart decisions in the cloud

In a period when you’re looking to open up access to data across your organization and make efficiency savings, a cloud deployment is an important consideration. We will give you the flexibility you need. Our volume-based licensing option means that you can use as many clusters as you need to deliver the desired level of performance and you’re not restricted in terms of the number of people who use the system. You can be flexible at a time when that is more important than ever.

We also understand that you can’t predict what’s going to be right for your data in the future, which is why you’ll have the option to choose pure cloud, on-premises or a hybrid approach, to give you the agility to move with your data strategy. What’s more, you can install and configure our analytics database on your cloud in a few clicks.

4. Future proof your business

During this Realignment phase, you need to consider laying the building blocks for future progress. A cloud deployment is a good example of that, as it plays an important role in democratizing data. But this is not the only solution that should be on your priorities list.

There will be a stage when your business is ready to focus more resources on innovation. When this time comes and you want to do more with your data, we make it easy for you. Our architecture enables you to perform advanced analytical tasks on large volumes of data, using any Loading...data science language – right in the database. So, you can bring Loading...Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Loading...Machine Learning (ML) algorithms and (BI) Business Intelligence directly to where you keep your data, helping you solve complex analytic challenges like Loading...predictive analytics with the minimum of fuss. Our data virtualization capabilities bring further simplicity by giving users transparent access to various data sources without any complexities, allowing you to remove data silos across your organization.

This step should not be an afterthought, though. It is essential that at this stage of dealing with such a crisis, your business begins to put the foundations in place for future innovation. This is not just about surviving in the short-term, it is about thriving and in many cases re-orientating for years to come.

We will explore this in more detail in our next post, focused on the Recovery phase, so keep an eye on the blog and our crisis response page for further insight.

If you want to get a feel for what’s possible with our analytics database, check out our Community Edition on your desktop – download it here.