Socialization at the Partners

Darryl McDonald has elaborated his concept of socialization of data (socializing is a key thing at conferences, so why have we never thought of those data before) today, and if you want to watch him doing so you can see for yourself here. People have expressed their curiosity about this concept in response to my post yesterday, so I will try and depict it here, in the way I understand it.

Darryl basically argued that if you want to draw value from your data, you need to do three things: integrate, explore and share them. Now this is what you do in databases of any size, no matter whether you are running a mere data mart or a full-scale enterprise data warehouse. In my own simple words, Darryl’s message was that we are used to building our own little model worlds – some smaller, some bigger – and tend to be content with them for some time, while at the same time data out there is virtually exploding. The examples he gave were social media, mobile devices and sensors. All of these new data sources hold huge business potentials once enterprises start to tap into them, which is already happening, and will be even more of it in two years’ time or so. What Darryl was really telling us was that we should think up ways to find and grasp those new opportunities. Teradata is providing the technical means for it.

What it all comes down to is what I call the “realization gap”, which occurs because we have been preached in the past years that (textbook style) innovation is led by business: we need it, so we invent it. But I think that at the moment, changes in business will be driven by new technologies, not the other way round. Just remember that mobile devices and geospatial data came first and all those location-based services that we appreciate now followed. In fact, only 18 months ago Teradata CTO Stephen Brobst predicted, not reported, these services. This gap has been closing with frantic speed.

Back to the technical side, the three steps of integrating-exploring-sharing your data. There was a challenge for us that we have risen to. On the one hand, we know that deeper insights require integration of new data with existing data – for example, making customers suitable offers requires more than just their location data, obviously. On the other hand, there is a whole new diversity both of data types and analytical tools specializing on these types. This is why Teradata has put so much effort on integration with partner tools and why we are looking for new ways in which our platforms can work together. From in-database analytics, data labs and the unified LDM to the alignment with Hadoop systems, it all serves to support the vision of an enterprise ecosystem that is open for data and people, as Darryl put it.

So we at Teradata are enabling tomorrow’s business breakthroughs because we have a clear idea which data are being generated and because we are making them available for analysis. Darryl’s platform socialization of data is our bit to help close the realization gap and at the same time take the pulse of all those pioneers that brace themselves to take those new opportunities. After all, ideas get born when people with different backgrounds engage in discussion, don’t they?

So much for now. If you want some lighter inspiration, what views you can get from truly granular material, have a look at the Sand Artists who performed at today’s general session.