Tech Insights: Interview with Alec Gardner, Teradata

In our new Tech Insight series, we speak with industry leaders to get their views of what the year ahead holds for the IT world. Today’s expert is Alec Gardner, general manager, advanced analytics for Teradata.

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

Businesses have begun to recognise the valuable business insights that can be derived using data analytics technology and this trend is likely to continue to gain momentum.

The challenge, however, still remains in connecting business and IT in roles, responsibilities, governance and execution. Without careful management of these aspects, the growing availability of big data will become a burden instead of an asset for some organisations. To solve this, businesses must create a consistent framework that includes clear roles assigned to managing data. The key is to follow a repeatable process to ensure accurate insight into customers and business operations is achieved consistently and reliably.

What do you see as the two or three biggest growth opportunities for your customers in 2015, and why?

The growth of the ‘discovery zone’: There will be a continued growth in the trend towards creating a ‘discovery zone’ - a dedicated area, integrated with the data warehouse, where a number of data analysts can load and test new data and analytic models.

Improved access to big data: It is critical for companies to have a business sponsor and a business driver for new analytics to ensure that accessibility is addressed.

The use of apps to gain customer insight: 2015 will see more companies understanding the importance of using apps to improve service and gain insight into individual behaviours.

What emerging trends or developing technologies may influence or change the way the ICT industry will do business in 2015, and why?

One of the biggest trends for 2015 will be the increased use of connection analytics: how organisations can use technology to better understand customers’ interactions and act on that information.

Connection analytics discovers interrelated connections and influences between people, products and processes within a network to refine analytic results. It can provide answers to business questions such as identification and influence of thought leaders, impact of external events on issues such as risk, or analysis of network performance based on causal relationships between nodes.

What new and innovative technologies do you see emerging in your IT solution categories in 2015, and how will they help your customers?

Data lakes are already changing the way businesses store data. I think we will see data lakes further embedded in businesses’ ICT systems.

As organisations come to grips with how to handle big data more effectively, they will look to better redesign and rebuild some data ingestion and integration tasks. This is likely to result in an increased uptake of data integration optimisation services to remove some of the unnecessary overhead and costs of data replication and processes.

To gain further efficiencies, organisations will look beyond the one-size-fits-all approach to find data solutions capable of intelligently storing and processing data on multiple media within one unified architecture, without the need for human intervention. This will also further enable greater execution of real-time analytics within this same framework.

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.