In his article posted January 9 on Medium, John Dillon, Aerospike’s CEO, shared his thoughts on real-time decisioning and what it means for companies today.
Even on a personal level, everyone is familiar with an incredible amount of information that’s available at our fingertips today. Whether it’s email or finding the right article online: it’s there – we just have to find it.
As more and more people access the Internet and devices go online to communicate in a connected world, analysts expect 6 billion smartphones and 50 billion telematic devices, while the World Economic Forum predicts that data will drive the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
With all that available data comes a lot of opportunity, but also a big challenge – how to manage and use it in real-time. In his article, John makes the point that the right approach to data management is farming it, not mining it. The distinction is that farming is sustainable, while mining depletes. This is important, because data can be used over and over and can even become more valuable in the process.
Yet, intelligently sifting through massive amounts of information is not simple. It’s why most of us are what vendors call ‘data rich and knowledge poor.’
The challenge in making all that valuable data usable is to analyze it and find elements of predictive behavior that can then fuel real-time decision engines. The ultimate goal here is to conduct analysis that allows you to make smart, data-based decisions. But herein lies the next challenge: analyzing the data and turning it into actionable insight has traditionally been a very slow process. Looking for patterns in petabytes of data is tedious and akin to looking for a needle in a haystack.
But that’s exactly what today’s businesses are being challenged with, because their processes are being conducted in real-time and online. Serving up the right ads to potential customers will decide over success of a business just as much as being able to accurately predict in an instant whether or not a bank can correctly decide if a financial transaction should be accepted or declined. In both of these cases – and countless others – the right decision has to be made in the blink of an eye or the customer will go elsewhere. Finding the best way to process information intelligently and helping your business come to the right conclusions is what solves this conundrum and it’s all made possible by modern computing platforms.
John’s complete article was previously published on Medium.
