Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2021. Read them in this 13th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
Putting More Power behind Data
By Justin Borgman, CEO and co-founder of Starburst
2020 has proven to be the year of data. Today, most companies are trying to become data-driven. They’re trying to use customer data to develop competitive advantages, operational data to reduce costs, or maybe transactional data to more quickly identify fraud and reduce risk. Ultimately data is at the heart of becoming a better business. Here is how I expect to see data continue to takeover 2021.
“Big data” is irrelevant.
We’ll see business leaders pointing instead to “wide data” to make data-driven decisions, which encompasses all types of data no matter where it lives – in the cloud, on prem, in data lakes or data warehouses.
ML/AI will become more accessible to a broader base of users.
To date, it’s been mainly up to data scientists to use the automation technologies to drive the business and gather data, but that is changing to include anyone in the organization who needs data access to make more intelligent decisions.
Organizations will face massive data deficit challenges.
The fast-pace at which things changed this year made old data irrelevant quickly. This year was a wake-up call for many business leaders and brought attention to the importance of combining all data when developing analytical models to ensure data is relevant, reliable, and up-to-date.
As companies become more multi-cloud oriented, it’s critical to choose tools that work across all clouds.
Even as companies move to a multi-cloud approach, they’re still battling the lock-in challenges associated with different cloud vendors, creating complications for companies looking to mature and scale after the pandemic this year.
IT teams became the hero this year, and the spotlight will continue to be on them.
It was IT who spearheaded the move to remote work overnight, which brought their critical role and skills to the forefront with the C-suite. This will likely make them more of a key buyer and decision-maker of technology deployments next year since they have earned the trust of the C-suite.
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About the Author
Justin is a subject matter expert on all things big data & analytics. Prior to founding Starburst, he was Vice President & GM at Teradata (NYSE: TDC), where he was responsible for the company’s portfolio of Hadoop products.
