Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2023. Read them in this 15th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
The power of the open data ecosystem
By Gerrit Kazmaier, Vice President & General
Manager, Data Analytics & Looker, Google Cloud
Looking ahead to 2023, data will continue to be organizations'
most valuable asset as they look for opportunities to make their business run
more efficiently. I believe that the key to digital transformation for most
organizations will be an open data ecosystem that embraces the sophistication
of their needs to combine point-solutions with data and analytics platforms
across multiple clouds.
However, in the coming year we will, unfortunately, start to see
the industry backsliding into another era of vendor lock-in. Just as the cloud
is becoming the center of business, companies are at risk of having limited
access to their own data because they're locked into closed vendor ecosystems,
with their own proprietary data formats and APIs. This will limit the flexibility
and creativity required to drive value from data.
The concern is certainly warranted. Businesses whose data is
locked in will not be as agile in reacting to market conditions and building
new apps and services needed to meet customer demands. It also prevents them
from collaborating with partners, suppliers and customers and co-innovating
across a broader ecosystem. Cloud lock-in can also limit an organization's
ability to optimize spend and pick the solutions that best fit their needs,
some of which they might already have in place.
Support for open standards and open data ecosystems becomes all the more
important when organizations seek to activate data to create intelligent
applications. Data is the foundation for AI/ML driven value creation, and
organizations need to leverage open data, AI and analytics ecosystems that let
them easily combine and enrich data across multiple sources, internal and
external. The rise of scalable and secure data-sharing platforms will be key to
creating an open and trusted ecosystem that drives innovation in 2023 and
forward.
My colleague June Yang, Vice President, Cloud AI and
Industry Solutions, Google Cloud expects to see businesses move toward open
data ecosystems as AI starts to become more mainstream:
"After years of growth in AI adoption, the technology has now hit
an inflection point where AI is no longer just for enterprises with the most
advanced technology stacks. Today, more and more mainstream businesses are
seeing the value AI can bring to help solve their most critical problems and
are embracing AI, and I expect to see more and more AI on "Main Street" in the
coming year. As these organizations adopt AI, I expect them to start using more
pre-trained models and fine-tune the model with additional data as they go
rather than starting to build models from scratch, since there are more
pre-trained AI models available in the market than ever before. I also expect
to see these companies opting for open data ecosystems versus proprietary data
stacks so that as they continue on their AI journeys they have the flexibility
to innovate and scale faster."
My colleague Andi Gutmans, Vice President & General
Manager, Databases, at Google Cloud has an important perspective on the
importance of breaking down barriers between transactional and operational in
the coming year:
"Organizations' competitive advantage lies in being able to
easily build intelligent, data-driven applications. This requires today's
developer to unlock and leverage data from both operational and analytical
systems and infuse machine learning models into their applications. We believe
in the coming years, the barriers between transactional and analytics workloads
will disappear. Traditionally, data architectures have separated these workloads
because each needed a fit-for-purpose database. Transactional databases are
optimized for fast reads and writes, while analytical databases are optimized
for aggregating large data sets. With advances in cloud-based data
architectures that leverage highly scalable, disaggregated compute and storage
with high-performance networking, we predict there will be new database
architectures that allow both transactional and analytical workloads within one
system without requiring applications to compromise on workload needs."
I firmly believe that digital transformation in 2023 and beyond
will hinge on breaking down barriers between data. The organizations that are
most successful in doing this will be the most agile and efficient -
conversely, businesses that struggle with data lock-in challenges will face the
greatest uphill battle when it comes to making their data work for them. While
2023 will see a backslide into vendor lock-in, I expect that in the long-term
businesses will realize the limits this creates and will move away from systems
that lock down their data. Ultimately, we are all moving toward a future where
open data is paramount.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Gerrit Kazmaier is the Vice President and General Manager for Data and Analytics at Google. Gerrit leads the development and design of Google Cloud’s data technology, which includes data warehousing and analytics. Gerrit’s mission is to build a unified data platform for all types of data processing as the foundation for the digital enterprise. He strongly focuses on the power of data. He is convinced that data isn’t just a technology advancement; in his view it is the prerequisite for our modern world and that it unlocks new opportunities for everyone in the pursuit of our individual, economical and societal goals.
Before joining Google and relocating to the Bay Area, Gerrit served as President of the HANA & Analytics team at SAP in Germany and led the global Product, Solution & Engineering teams for Databases, Data Warehousing and Analytics. In 2015, Gerrit served as the Vice President of SAP Analytics Cloud in Vancouver, Canada. Gerrit studied Business Informatics and Computer Science at the University of Applied Science Constance in Germany and at the University of Nottingham in England.