Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2022.  Read them in this 14th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.

Need for Speed - Accelerating the Value of Data

By Manish Sood, Founder & CTO, Reltio

Master data management (MDM) has been around for a long time, with many legacy vendors in the space having existed since the late 1990s to early 2000s. When I founded Reltio in 2011, my mission was to introduce a more modern way of managing data and accelerating the value of data. In 2012, Reltio delivered the industry's first cloud-native, software-as-a-service (SaaS) data platform.

While being no stranger to digital transformation, the MDM space continues to evolve. The data challenges and complexity of the current environment are growing at an unprecedented rate as the world continues to become a "digital-first" landscape. I predict that 2022 will require companies to accelerate their growth through digital transformation that fully optimizes their data as a strategic asset. By breaking down data silos, adopting digital engagement models that work, and moving more of their applications to the cloud, data can fuel companies' success and not hold them back.

Keeping Pace with a Changing Landscape

With the expanding number of enterprise processes and applications, getting timely, actionable, and quality data about customers, vendors, and suppliers presents challenges for many companies. Many are struggling to unify information across enterprises that now regularly have anywhere from 300-500 applications on their platforms. In many cases we've seen this expansion lead to inflexible "data silos" that create a roadblock to unlocking the power of integrated data. Too many organizations are stuck with legacy MDM systems that only compound the complexity, leaving them without the business agility, enterprise-scale, and insight-ready data needed to bring big ideas to life.

As a SaaS provider, we continuously analyze how our solutions help our clients break those silos down and integrate data across an entire ecosystem to not only improve business processes, but also offer a customer omnichannel experience that delivers with speed while improving accuracy and quality of data. All of these actions drive the success of their business.

The ultimate goal should be to make our customers' jobs easier by becoming the most reliable partner possible. To be a supportive business partner, I believe companies must value three critical criteria:

• Possessing an in-depth knowledge of your customer base.
• Valuing the quality of your customer information over quantity.
• Putting cloud at the forefront of your technology strategy to open up new digital experiences. ​​
  

COVID Continues to Drive Changing Client Demands

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to affect all industries across the globe, the need for agile and flexible digital solutions is crucial for meeting client demand, customer expectations and the requirements of an increasingly remote workforce. The pandemic will eventually fade from view, but the rapid, global digital transformation that began to take shape over the last few years will only grow. The requirements for revolutionary SaaS tools will increase as more workers switch to remote and people demand a fast and seamless experience in every aspect of their lives.

To keep up in this fast-paced, COVID-impacted world, organizations need to expand their technology portfolios. We are seeing more companies increasing their investment in SaaS, cloud, and data solutions, as these have become the fundamental pillars for running and growing their businesses. Employees, customers, vendors, and suppliers have all come to expect a seamless digital experience in every domain. At Reltio, we look forward to continuing our product innovation to align with the ever-changing needs of all of our customers wherever they are in their digital transformation.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

 

Manish is Reltio's Founder & Chairman and CTO, responsible for overseeing the Office of the CTO, M&A strategy, business development, long-term product strategy and innovation at Reltio. Prior to founding Reltio in 2011, Manish led Product strategy and management for the Master Data Management (MDM) platform at Informatica and Siperian. He is the co-author of the patent that revolutionized MDM through a global business identifier. During his career, Manish has architected some of the largest and most widely used data management solutions used by Fortune 100 companies today.