Tech Insights: Interview with Alec Gardner, Teradata

What do you see as the single biggest challenge facing the ICT industry in the year ahead, and why?

The greatest challenge will be simply cutting through all the hype and buzz around big data and analytics, which is creating a lot of confusion. This confusion is leading to a sort of 'analysis paralysis' among many organisations that want to implement big data and analytics solutions but don't know how to approach it or deploy the technology. To get past this confusion, organisations should have a hypothesis or a specific outcome in mind that they want to achieve from the technology.

What do you see as the two or three biggest growth opportunities for your customers in 2016, and why?

One of the biggest growth opportunities stems from the continuing growth of digital data creation. The opportunity to capture and use the amount of data that's being produced now is enormous. Digital data is far more valuable when combined with the existing rich data sets and analytics can be applied in context to make them more relevant. Another major growth opportunity is the application of data and analysis across entire organisations. By thinking laterally about common problems across the enterprise, companies can begin to use analysis insights gained from customer interactions. Finally, our customers have the opportunity to become data-driven organisations, where most business processes are digital and produce data that can be analysed for insight, greater efficiency, better financial management, and new products and services.

What emerging trends or developing technologies may influence or change the way the ICT industry will do business in 2016, and why?

One that is set to be a game changer is the idea of the 'sentient enterprise'. This is where organisations can become more intuitive by listening, analysing and making business decisions based on data. By embedding analytics and algorithms into business processes, sentient enterprises can begin to develop autonomous decision-making platforms that are able to monitor, engage and intervene in all sorts of business processes, both internally and externally, in real time.

What new and innovative technologies do you see emerging in your IT solution categories in 2016, and how will they help your customers?

We will continue to see development in productivity and collaboration tools for analysts that will help speed up the development of big data apps, which can be embedded into larger frameworks. This will provide analysts with easier data processing, meaning they can spend less time on technical tasks. We are seeing the growth of the 'listening framework' idea, which is likely to continue to grow in prominence over the coming year. The ability to constantly 'listen' to the available data ties into the sentient enterprise, and involves streaming and processing large volumes of data in real time.

What are your customers demanding of you more today than five years ago, and how will you meet these requirements in 2016?

Customers in general are demanding a lot more elasticity in engagement of our solutions. From a consulting point of view, customers are looking for expert services and enablement. From a technology perspective, they want solutions that can be scaled up and down rapidly.

Alec Gardner is General Manager responsible for the Teradata Advanced Analytics line of business in Australia and New Zealand, incorporating Teradata Aster, Big Data Analytic solutions and the Teradata partnership with key analytic partners such as SAS. In this capacity, Alec heads an expert team of data scientists and business analysts.