“D&A is in the business of driving stakeholder value,” said Donna Medeiros, senior director analyst, at Gartner in a statement. “The most successful CDAOs are outperforming their peers by projecting an executive presence and building an agile and strategic D&A function that shapes data-driven business performance and operational excellence.”

Successful CDAOs Traits 

The survey found that D&A leaders who rated themselves as “effective” or “very effective” across 17 different executive leadership traits correlated with those reporting high organizational and team performance. For example, 43% of top-performing D&A leaders reported effectiveness in committing time to their own professional development, compared with 19% of low performers.

“Successful CDAOs must be elite leaders,” said Alan Duncan, distinguished VP analyst, Gartner, in a statement. “Top-performing CDAOs invest in their success by developing skills to thrive in ambiguous circumstances, articulate compelling value stories and identify D&A products and services that can drive business impact.”

CDAOs New Demands

The survey found that CDAOs are tasked with a broad range of responsibilities, including defining and implementing D&A strategy (60%), oversight of D&A strategy (59%), creating and implementing D&A governance (55%) and managing data-driven culture change (54%).

Furthermore, many D&A functions are receiving increased investment, including data management (65%), data governance (63%) and advanced analytics (60%). The mean reported D&A budget is $5.41 million, and 44% of D&A teams increased in size in the last year.

“The demands being placed upon D&A, as well as increased investment, reflect a growing confidence in CDAOs’ abilities and recognition of the data office as an indispensable business function,” said Medeiros. “However, this leads to more work as pressure grows for D&A to achieve tangible business results.”

Roadblocks to the Success of D&A Initiatives 

Given the scope and complexity of demands being placed on D&A teams, the lack of available talent has quickly become a top impediment to success, as reported by 39% of respondents. The top six roadblocks reported in the survey are all human-related challenges, as shown in figure below.

To build an effective D&A team, CDAOs must have a robust talent management strategy that goes beyond hiring ready-made talent, says Gartner. This should include education, training and coaching for data-driven culture and data literacy, both within the core D&A team and the broader business and technology communities.

D&A Performance & Business Strategy Alignment

The survey found that 78% of respondents rank corporate or organizational strategy and vision as one of the top three inputs to the D&A strategy. Additionally, 68% are prioritizing D&A initiatives based on alignment to strategic goals.

“CDAOs who prioritize strategy over tactics are the most successful,” said Duncan. “Because the CDAO serves multiple stakeholders across the business, they must align with organizational strategic priorities and focus on selling the D&A vision to the CEO, CIO and CFO as key influencers.”

The post Gartner: Less than Half of Data & Analytics Teams Effectively Drive Value to Business appeared first on My TechDecisions.

According to Microsoft, organizations can use Grafana to bring together logs, traces, metrics and other disparate data from across an organization and visualize all its telemetry data in a single user interface, including across on-premises, Azure and multi-cloud environments.

With the new offering, the experience is optimized for Azure-native data stores such as Azure Monitor and Data Explorer, making it easier for customers to connect any resources in their subscription and view all resulting telemetry in a familiar Grafana dashboard, Microsoft says.

Microsoft says customers can preserve existing charges in the Azure portal used for monitoring and via a service-to-service integration, can bring any chart into the Azure portal over to their Azure Managed Grafana instance with a one-click to pin function to automate the migration process.

The tool offers dashboards for various Azure Monitor features to help customers build new visualizations. Some features with built-in dashboards include Azure Monitor applications insights, Azure Monitor container insights, Azure Monitor virtual machines insights and Azure Monitor alerts.

Customers can also customize user permissions with specific roles and assignments stored in Azure Active Directory (AD), with definitions mapped transparently to Grafana’s internal roles, enforcing the actual access control.

“This integration enables both simplicity and consistency by allowing customers to manage users in their teams and authorize their use of a Grafana instance centrally through Azure Active Directory,” Microsoft says in an Azure blog.

Azure Managed Grafana can also be configured to access Azure Monitor through a managed identity set up as part of the Grafana instance creation, eliminating the need to deal with another credential separately.

Microsoft also announced new Grafana integrations with Azure Monitor, including the ability to pin Azure Monitor visualizations from Azure Portal to Grafana dashboards and new out-of-the-box Azure Monitor dashboards.

The post Azure Managed Grafana, Integrations In Preview appeared first on My TechDecisions.

Externally, data can be used to better market to customers, keep track of their spending habits, understand their pain points, and gain insight into their purchasing decisions. Internally, data can be used to improve processes, cut through overhead, spur productivity, and make decisions.

It all comes down to business intelligence, which encompasses all of the things that leaders take into account in order to make decisions about their organizations. However, data has allowed leaders greater insight into the reality behind these decisions, where for many years these leaders relied on smaller data sets and gut feelings.

Digital transformation has become a favorite phrase in the lexicon of business strategy over the past several years. At the heart of digital transformation is data and analytics. Gathering data about various aspects of the organization, analyzing that data to find trends, and understanding those trends to create business intelligence to help make decisions.

How do technology managers realize the benefits of data and analytics? On the whole, by implementing sensors and software that gathers information, and utilizing an analytics platform to parse through that information to recognize trends. All of this is available to companies right now. However, different businesses and different environments will require different solutions. There is no one-size-fits-all solution to data and analytics. Instead, building an analytics strategy is about figuring out what’s possible and customizing it to your organization.

Let’s look at what’s possible, and what others are doing as part of their digital transformation strategies in terms of data and analytics.

Meeting Rooms

The meeting space has become a great starting point for organizations implementing a strategy around data and analytics. Meeting rooms are isolated, relatively uniform, and a huge part of the productivity of an organization’s staff. It makes sense that organizations want to use data and analytics to streamline the meeting space as much as possible.

Room occupancy sensors can be installed to understand when and how many people participate in different meetings. This information can be gathered to provide an overhead view of how meeting spaces are being utilized in your office. Perhaps the meeting space on the third floor is seldom used. The meeting space on the second floor is used often, but only at 50% capacity. Huddle spaces on the other hand are being utilized throughout the day.

The specific technology within the meeting rooms can be connected to control platforms to gather data as well. How often are screens used? What about audio equipment? Are people actually utilizing the touch capabilities of the screen? What kind of devices are being brought into the room? How often are different products breaking? How much time does the IT team spend fixing these problems?

Air quality sensors also bring in information. Are meeting spaces too hot or too cold? Is there too much carbon monoxide in the room, making employees unhealthy?

You begin to make decisions. That third-floor space can be converted into huddle spaces. The second-floor space can be divided into two meeting rooms. People love the touchscreens, so we should bring in more of those. People also like to use their own devices, so we should enable them to easily connect to displays in the room. This product from this manufacturer breaks down too often – let’s not use them anymore.

The secondary benefits in meeting rooms are great as well. If you learn that most meeting rooms aren’t being utilized after 4:00, you can automate those rooms to shut down hours earlier than before. This saves on utility costs. If a room is too hot or too cold you can regulate that and make the office more comfortable for employees.

None of this information is possible to gather without data and analytics – unless you want to hire full time employees to sit in meeting rooms and write everything down.

Manufacturing Floor

Being in the pharmaceutical industry, data is extremely important in both ensuring that the yield is at maximum capacity (and therefore maximum profit), and that the process and yield meet strict FDA requirements. Analytics have allowed both companies to better monitor and better create manufactured products.

In 2016, TechDecisions was able to speak at length with Gloria Gadea-Lopez about how Shire has utilized Dell Statistica in its process. Gloria works as the Director of Manufacturing Systems in Internal manufacturing at a facility that manufactures only about 30 batches of its product per year, so every batch is extremely important to the overall profitability of the company. More importantly, these batches will be used to combat real life diseases, so the pressure to make sure that there are no anomalies and all of the batches are delivered is serious.

“My joke is, we don’t have big data, we have wide data,” says Robert Dimitri, Associate Director Manufacturing Systems at Shire. “Meaning we’re lucky if we manufacture 30 batches in a year. Our processes run for weeks and months. So we have to collect an enormous number of variables in order to monitor our process. We need to enable the end users on the data side with us much data as possible because that’s all we have. With the length of time that our processes run we have to be aware of what’s going on and able to react to anything that’s happening during the manufacturing process. Having that visibility is absolutely critical.”

There was once a time when scientists at the facility would hand-record data samples and enter them into spreadsheets for analysis. This took time, as data could only be obtained by checking sensors manually, and in many cases by manually taking samples and recording the data. By adding sensors and tying them into a data collection platform, Shire was able to save time and effort, and collect data sets at a much faster rate – days and weeks which used to take weeks and months.

Statistica then analyzes those data sets to provide information about how the manufacturing processes are performing. This analysis can happen for processes that are daily as well as those that take months to run their course. Data scientists within the manufacturing facility can then take the analysis and use the information to better run their processes. So, for example, analysis might recognize that yield is greatest when a batch has a certain pH level at a certain temperature. Scientists can then monitor the pH level and temperature to ensure greatest yield. And this happens in almost real-time, so that scientists don’t have to wait until the batch is finished to understand how well the batch will come out. They can monitor as it goes in order to create the best yield for every batch.

Statistica also allows Shire to scale and validate data. “Things happen in an environment of constant change. So maintaining compliance while operating in constant change is challenging,” says Gadea-Lopez. “So we need to have the right application that allows us to manage change. At the same time, continuing the expansion of these applications, either by onboarding new products and processes, or by expanding the use of the core application to new areas of use.

“One area that’s very interesting right now is that the facility in Lexington utilizes disposable technology. Traditionally, we make the product using stainless steel [reusable technology]. Single-use systems are a completely different way of manufacturing. We have another plant that makes the same product on the traditional stainless-steel technology. So we can monitor performance, get approval for the facility, and demonstrate parallels. That’s where these applications are priceless – we can monitor and use all of the data from the separate systems at the same time.”

This same process can be applied to any manufacturing facility – implement sensors, gather data in real time, and ensure that manufacturing is at peak performance.

Shipping and Receiving

The transportation industry has also seen huge benefits from implementing data and analytics in order to better track and prepare for shipping and receiving. This involves GPS sensors in vehicles moving products and materials around, and scanning those shipments as they arrive and depart.

This allows organizations real-time understanding of potential delays in shipments. When an accident causes a truck to sit still for two hours, the organization is aware of this delay. They can reach out to customers to warn them – some platforms even have the capability to automate this and let customers know about delays quickly so those customers can better prepare for a delayed shipment.

As this data is gathered, organizations can find patterns for better efficiency. Perhaps, with all of the miles racked up, it is better to switch to electric vehicles and save on gasoline. Maybe there are shipments that can be slightly delayed in order to place them on the same vehicle. Perhaps certain drivers aren’t performing as well as others. Maybe certain vehicles are breaking down more often than others.

Data and analytics gives you this insight before it becomes a problem. It offers real-time updates to shipping and receiving. The faster you get shipments where they are going, the more revenue you can generate. The more efficiently you can get shipments to where they are going, the more money you save.

Retail Environments

Retail environments have also become great entryways into data and analytics strategies.

Again, people counting sensors can give you an idea of how many people are in stores and where they congregate. Facial recognition software can give you an idea of where people of specific genders or ages move throughout the store. This can help organizations better set up the store, to ensure the right products are in the right spots.

Inventory management is also a huge opportunity for data and analytics. The faster organizations understand what products are flying off the shelves, and what products are gathering dust, the faster they can update their strategies. Cancel a shipment of the underperforming products and use that money to purchase more of the best-selling product.

Data and analytics in a retail environment can help organizations better understand how customers shop – which allows organizations to better suit their stores toward customer habits.

Your Organization

Again, data and analytics aren’t one-size-fits-all. You’ll need to tailor your strategy toward your information.

The most important parts are the sensors that gather the data you need, and the analytics platform that digests that data and provides charts, graphs, and spreadsheets for your leaders to easily interpret.

Keep that in mind, and you’ll be well on the way to digital transformation.

The post How to Use Data and Analytics to Make Business Decisions appeared first on My TechDecisions.

Just like any technology decision, the answer will require a decent amount of research. But we’ve put together this guide to help.

Analytics platform benefits

Data is increasingly being sought after to make both tactical and strategic decisions. This can range from what technology to deploy and how spaces are designed. Analytics takes all of those data points and tells a visual story.

Companies that use business intelligence and analytics platforms are more profitable and more efficient, says Daniel Newman, founder and CEO of V3B.

“In the macro view, these solutions give their businesses a better handle on things like what products are most successful, where profits are being bled out; and in the micro view, it allows them to get granular about how the business performs via every single element.”

It’s about absorbing and analyzing data in order to reveal actionable insight that ultimately improve decision-making.

These platforms also enable less tech savvy employees to access data to create reporting and analysis without the need to learn programming.

Before you choose a system, though, it is important to ensure the underlying data is relatively clean and ready for being analyzed.

“Typically, this would mean that the analytics head talks to the data engineering/governance team to understand the state of the data,” says Jayaprakash Nair, Head of Analytics at Altimetrik.

“Creating a baseline of knowledge of the quality becomes the foundation for evaluating analytics platforms.”

Choosing the right analytics tools

Before seeking out a business analytics platform, IT departments and stakeholders also need to understand what data they are trying to analyze, says Laurie Berg, Director of Product Management for solutions provider AVI-SPL.

“They need to have data sources that tell a full story and are correlated. For example, having data about an MCU does not give a complete picture of how collaboration technology and spaces are used. You also have to look at other components of collaboration and marry that data.”

Related: The Benefits of Meeting Room Analytics and Intelligence: Free Webinar

Smaller companies obviously have more finite resources, so they need to decide where the data resides, who manages it, and what outcomes they need from analytics. Of course, lifecycle will be extra important for smaller businesses.

You don’t want to only think about what you need right here-and-now. Think about the workplace you’re going to some day grow into. Data creates an action. Once an action is complete, what are the next steps?

Comparing analytics platforms

Whenever you start looking at options, think about pre-built platforms or something you and your team designs. Most people take a hybrid approach where they tweak a pre-built system, according to Saundra Merollo, Sr. Sales Engineer – Strategic Accounts at Sharp Electronics.

For a product to be categorized as an analytics platform, it must be end-to-end and incorporate five key elements:

• data preparation
• data modeling
• data blending
• data visualization
• insights delivery

“There’s lots out there which don’t actually provide those elements,” she says. “You’ll see lots of software and hosting sites, but they aren’t a true analytics platform. Using those can cost more money later on if you decide that what they’re missing is what you need.”

Another important point to keep in mind is that feature parity/comparison between the tools is OK, but it should not be used as the only yardstick.

“Most analytics platform vendors are aggressively deploying new features at frequent intervals,” Nair says. “So, if you base your decision solely on features, then you might lose out on a tool which could potentially be more suitable for your business.”

Use cases are a better way to “kick the tires” and understand how well a potential platform could handle the needs of the company.

Identify two platforms which might meet your specific business need. Then think about both your current and desired future state. Know what your company’s resources are — can one competitor more wholly fill your needs than another?

Get references — as simple as it sounds, it’s a worthwhile move so you can get a handle on their offerings.

Things any worthy system will have

“I wave a caution flag against any universalisms,” Newman says. “But total cost of ownership, compliance, and adaptability are the only real universal quality points to look for. The rest depends on what you need the system for. Do they have tools for low- or no-code for building apps which can help your business? Is there room (or a need) for AI?”

Merollo mostly agrees, but offers some other hints at what great systems typically entail.

“Top platforms provide alerts based on Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). It’s really useful to have the system tell YOU when you’ve reached a goal.”

It’s really useful to have the system tell YOU when you’ve reached a goal.

It should also allow some key users to access the data remotely. That may not be an issue for your organization right now, but it’s hard to imagine a workplace for which such a feature might not eventually come in handy.

If the data isn’t accessible to key users, what’s the point?

“Better systems will offer 90-day pilot programs, since most 30-day pilots aren’t really long enough to get an actual idea of the system provides what you need it to provide.”

Other points to consider:

• Simple implementation — you want something that implements quickly and easily.
• There needs to be compatibility with both Apple and Android devices. The more open-platform, the better.
• Ability to customize and ease of customization.

A note on business analytics pricing

According to Newman, the biggest mistake most businesses make is trying to save their way to a profit.

“‘Cheap’ can be a double entendre. Be careful of really inexpensive options; they may not be of the quality you need to actually fulfill your needs.”

You’re paying by the month, so it can become costly. If you’re going to invest, you need to have both main goals and stretch goals to make sure you’re getting the maximum value you can from the system.

Although pricing is very important, organizations need to think about what they would be paying in resources’ time and effort in trying to provide the information needed without a platform in place or without the right platform in place.

Whatever system you choose, remember: total ROI should be the benchmark.

The post Choosing the Right Business Analytics Tools for Your Business or Org appeared first on My TechDecisions.

That’s just what happens on screen. The most powerful systems of today will further remote management to include monitoring and control of devices – choose which screens are on or off, and be notified when there is a problem with a display or device. This kind of automation not only delivers the right message at the right time, but can save money in utility costs.

One of the biggest draws of modern digital signage systems is in data and analytics. Today’s systems can gather information about who is watching what, when, analyze that information, and visualize it to provide owners of the systems with business intelligence to better understand how to change or expand on systems.

Click here to register for this webinar on September 23rd at 2:00 PM ET

With quality information, you understand what your customers need and how to create the kind of great experiences that build loyalty.

During this webinar presented by Commercial Integrator, TechDecisions, AVI-SPL, and Samsung, you’ll learn about the innovative ways digital signage is being used to connect with external audiences while providing your team with valuable performance data.

We’ll also introduce you to Samsung’s MagicINFO, a comprehensive management solution for data-driven marketing. MagicINFO makes it easy for businesses to create, schedule, and deliver dynamic content while empowering them with the insight they need to:

• Create, play, and manage content
• Deliver real-time data insights
• Analyze customer behavior

Join us on Sept. 23 at 2 p.m. EDT and learn how to go from raw data to information that is ready to be viewed by your audience, while giving you a dashboard with detailed reports so you can gauge the impact of your content.

Click here to register now!

The post Webinar: Content, Device, and Data: Expect More from Your Digital Signage appeared first on My TechDecisions.

In the healthcare industry, this practice is nothing new. Doctors often use data analysis to track diseases and better understand risks and results from different procedures. So it’s no surprise that in the battle against the COVID-19 pandemic, the United States is turning to data mining to help better understand how the disease spreads, affects different people, and more.

In an exclusive from The Daily Beast, we’ve learned that Palantir, a data-mining firm created by Pete Thiel that has worked with a number of government agencies in the past, will play a significant role in gathering and analyzing data about COVID-19 for the United States.

According to The Daily Beast, Palantir will provide a major aspect of the analytics platform called HHS Protect Now that the federal government is underway creating. The company has signed a contract with the Department of Health and Human Services to bring added expertise to the program.

According to The Daily Beast:

The HHS Protect Now platform, which is set to be unveiled later this week, pulls data from across the federal government, state and local governments, healthcare facilities, and colleges, to help administration officials determine how to “mitigate and prevent spread” of the coronavirus, according to a spokesperson for the department.

The White House will receive nightly briefings on the analysis of the data collected as part of HHS Protect Now.

This project really highlights the value of gathering and analyzing data. At this point many pieces of technology on the AV side as well as the IT side are connected to the network. If they’re connected, then they can be outfitted with sensors that send valuable data to an analytics platform.

That platform then gives insight into a number of business aspects. From how long rooms are being utilized, to how much energy is being consumed (and paid for), to different levels on manufacturing processes in real time. The possibilities are limitless, and can be catered directly to your organization.

If it’s good enough to help fight a global pandemic, then its good enough to help you make better decisions in your organization. Every technology manager should think about data analytics and how they could fit for you.

The post Data-Mining Company Palantir Will Gather COVID-19 Data for U.S. appeared first on My TechDecisions.

The companies will collaborate on new applications and integrations between platforms, enabling customers to make data-driven business decisions.

“We pride ourselves on maximizing our customers’ Telecompetence by leveraging the latest in software and technology to simplify the complexities once associated with telecom, giving our customers back time and energy to focus on growing their business,” said Brandon Bazemore, CEO of Audian.

“Our partnership with Xarios only extends our dedication to these principles, and we look forward to learning from and utilizing their approach to call analytics and reporting to deliver performance improvements to our customers.”

The strategic partnership is underway with Audian’s and Xarios’ development teams collaborating on new-to-market software solutions to address operational challenges faced in a business environment where end-customers require faster and more accurate responses than ever, the companies said in a joint announcement of the collaboration.

“We have a passion for our real-time call analytics products and how they can work for a customer, a commitment to deliver value and functionality, and a passion for world class customer service,” said Robin Russell, CEO of Xarios.

Read Next: Live Sports Broadcasting VR is an Example of How Virtual Reality Can Dramatically Alter an Industry

“Audian’s unique approach to hosted voice and data systems — as well as a shared passion for customer service — make them an ideal partner to create new solutions for today’s telecom needs, not those of the past.”

The post Xarios & Audian Partnership Brings Real-Time Call Analytics to the VoIP Market appeared first on My TechDecisions.

While beneficial on a department level, siloed ECM systems did not allow the school to take advantage of intra-departmental document access, optimization of processes, and valuable operations analytics.

Disparate systems also introduced the possibility of having redundant solutions or systems: something accountants and eagle-eyed investors wouldn’t tolerate.

So, naturally, there came a point where the school realized their old way of doing things just wouldn’t work anymore.

ECM software must-haves

Take it from Texas A&M: there are some things that a wise technology manager will look for in an ECM solution, even if they don’t anticipate using it immediately.

In the school’s case, the goals were:

• to avoid software purchases at the department level
• to reduce costs by eliminating redundant systems
• to enhance the ability to share documents and workflows

But savvy buyers of ECM solutions will look more broadly for the following: 

• records management
• business process automation
• extensive security and access controls

After evaluating options, the university selected a Laserfiche central support service. IT was identified as the central support, and the school established a shared service approach to deploy and scale the software.

Real-life enterprise content management benefits

Shared ECM consolidated IT functions at Texas A&M from several system members to one location, reducing costs and time spent on maintenance, says Jeffery Phillips, associate director at Texas A&M Information Technology.

“In addition, the shared system provided a consistent framework to support compliance; risk mitigation through disaster recovery capabilities; the ability for different departments and system members to leverage the cumulative accomplishments of their colleagues; internal and remote access to electronic documents; and reduced printing and physical paperwork—as well as the space and filing cabinets previously required to house that paperwork,” he says.

The university system worked with Laserfiche to identify local best practices and standardize across the ECM software while consolidating resources, realizing enterprise content management benefits and continuously looking for ways to improve.

They were able to scale the system by negotiating a master agreement with the provider to move from a single server with multiple—but limited—repository implementation of ECM software to a multiserver, scalable system.

Read Next: Residential Technology You Should Consider for Your Office

By offering ECM as a shared service, the Texas A&M University System is able to make available economies of scale and document sharing that individual departments could not by themselves.

Colleges and agencies in the university system that use the shared service receive a feature-rich implementation at a more affordable price point; they also receive maintenance and support from the central IT department and can leverage existing framework and do not need to build file structures from scratch.

The post Getting the Most Out of Enterprise Content Management Software appeared first on My TechDecisions.

Customers can bring data into the data lake from multiple sources through pre-defined templates. Users can automatically classify and prepare the data and centrally define granular data access policies to govern access by the different groups within an organization. They can then analyze the data using their choice of AWS analytics and machine learning services, including Amazon Redshift, Amazon Athena, and AWS Glue, with Amazon EMR, Amazon QuickSight, and Amazon SageMaker integration set for the following months.

No additional charges will be required to use AWS Lake Formation – instead customers pay only for the underlying AWS services used.

“Our customers tell us that Amazon S3 is the ideal place to house their data lakes, which is why AWS hosts more data lakes than anyone else – with tens of thousands and growing every day. They’ve also told us that they want it to be easier and faster to set up and manage their data lakes,” says Raju Gulabani, Vice President, Databases, Analytics, and Machine Learning, AWS. “That’s why we built AWS Lake Formation, so customers can spend more time learning from their data and innovating, rather than wrestling that data into functioning data lakes. AWS Lake Formation is available today and we’re excited to see how customers use it as one of the building blocks for growing and transforming their businesses and customer experiences.”

Learn more about AWS Lake Formation from the Accenture customer success story, outlined in the AWS press release:

Accenture is a leading global professional services company, providing a broad range of services and solutions in strategy, consulting, digital, technology, and operations. “I focus on helping clients in their ‘Data on Cloud’ journey. Specific to that, we have seen that organizations are dealing with a lack of trusted data when they need to perform analytics on data coming from multiple sources,” said Namrata Maheshwary, Senior Architect for the Data Business Group, Accenture. “Data cleansing is a critical step in data analytics and can greatly impact the business outcome and decision making. The new features in AWS Lake Formation have been hugely beneficial to address the challenge of data veracity and securing access to the data lake. We found it tremendously useful to make use of the advanced machine learning techniques for data preparation to find matching records, clean, and deduplicate data from different data sources. This will help reduce the time, effort, and cost, while improving the quality and accuracy of the data in a customer’s data lakes.”

The post Amazon Web Services Announces Availability of AWS Lake Formation appeared first on My TechDecisions.

Empowering End Users Through Trusted Advisors

The benefit of working with an IT provider is clear enough – they’re vendor agnostic (or should be). Instead of buying direct from an organization that will always recommend its own products, an IT provider will offer the solutions that best fits your organization’s needs.

The benefit of an AVANT Trusted Advisor, according to the company, is that they have the resources from AVANT to help sift through the myriad solutions and find the best product at the best price for their customers.

AVANT Analytics represents an entirely new benefit to the company’s Trusted Advisor program. AVANT Analytics will aid Trusted Advisors and their business customers in understanding industry trends around emerging new technologies in cloud, colocation, connectivity, SD-WAN, security, UCaaS and more.

AVANT will analyze real-world insights from thousands of annual IT business purchasing decisions and conduct primary research to deliver regular reports on the state of disruption in the industry in the form of studies, papers, blogs, podcasts and briefings.

“AVANT Analytics and research will be funneled through the Trusted Advisors,” says Drew Lydecker, President and Co-Founder of AVANT Communications. “AVANT can help end users find the right Trusted Advisors as we represent hundreds and hundreds of firms.”

Disrupting the Traditional Research Model

AVANT pulls from an impressive database that will be difficult for any other survey provider to pull from. The company represents almost one hundred carriers around the world, from enterprises companies like CenturyLink and Masergy to the disruptors and SMBs providing similar services.

In the data center market they represent Equinix, CoreSite, Telehouse, and over 1,600 other facilities around the world.

Over one hundred cloud companies providing every acronym you can imagine – IaaS, DRaaS, UCaaS, CCaaS, BaaS, and so on. Cybersecurity companies like Trustwave and Alert Logic, and many more.

“When you represent the whole industry and study the ins and outs of all these different service providers – they’re vastly different from each other,” says Lydecker. “We’ve challenged traditional research. We’re looking at it completely different.”

AVANT has hired Ken Presti, a veteran industry analyst previously associated with IDC, his own agency, and other prominent channel consultancies, to spearhead the initiative.

Presti specializes in combining empirical data, his own experience, and the perspectives of industry leaders in a way that fully illustrates technology trends, business model evolution, likely

outcomes, and strategies for success. Presti and AVANT plan to disrupt the way typical research is done around IT implementation patterns – focusing on real-time information.

“Traditional research has been around for a long time. Analysts take a talk about verticals, industries, providers, and it takes a long time [gather information] in the way they always have,” says Lydecker. “AVANT has thousands of sellers around the world that are constantly talking to enterprises. We see deals in real time.

For example, a recent real-life organization signed a deal with RingCentral through an AVANT Trusted Advisor for 30,000 seats. AVANT will monitor why they chose that particular provider, how the seats are deployed, how satisfied the customer is, and more.

AVANT then harvests that data in real-time to provide analysis of the success of the project.

Now multiply that by every deal done through AVANT trusted advisors, for every service that AVANT represents – you’ll see that AVANT is pulling from a huge data set with valuable information in real time.

They can then deliver that information to Trusted Advisors in a manner more timely than traditional research allows, because AVANT has access to the data as it is created.

“We’re seeing more next-generation opportunities than anyone else We’re harvesting all that big data. We have a whole research team, our engineering team, that are constantly writing reports, grading providers, talking about strengths and weaknesses,” says Lydecker.

“We’re going to turn around and hand that to the Trusted Advisor Movement, so that they’re in front of the customer giving them every bit of information that exists.

“If they’re big fans of Gartner, IDC, Forrester – that’s great! I would highly advise to look at AVANT Analytics as well, which is real-time where the market is going.”

How do end users benefit from this program? Hold Trusted Advisors accountable for the information you know they have, and make them prove their knowledge and business intelligence before signing on the dotted line.

A rising tide raises all ships, and the more information your provider has, the better you’ll be for it.

The Research That Started It All

In many ways, the inspiration for AVANT Analytics came from AVANT’s 2019 State of Disruption Report. The report surveyed 300 enterprise technology leaders at the manager level and above who lead tech purchasing decisions.

It reveals the state of digital transformation efforts, the role that Trusted Advisors and other third-parties play in the process, and the rate at which disruptive technologies are replacing legacy tools. This is the same type of information that AVANT Analytics will deliver to Trusted Advisors in real-time as it continues to grow.

Let’s take a look at some of the findings:

Digital Research is a Matter of Business Policy

• 85% of tech leaders polled have a plan in place
• Manufacturing (93%), Financial Services (95%), and Ecommerce (78%) are the industries that most have digital transformation plans in place
• While companies with revenues of $100M-$1B (93%), $10M-$100M (85%), and $1M-$10M (65%) have plans in place, extreme confidence in that plan is relatively lower (47%, 40%, and 20% respectively)

Trusted Advisors Utilized by Companies More Often

• 71% of organizations polled use Trusted Advisors for Cloud-Based Computing Services
• 59% use them for Cybersecurity
• 55% use Trusted Advisors for Data Network Infrastructure
• 51% use Trusted Advisors for SaaS Applications

Talent and Budget Drive Fear of Transformation

• 32% of leaders are not confident in digital transformation initiatives due to lack of internal IT resources
• 24% are not confident due to lack of internal IT expertise
• 24% are not confident due to lack of transformation-specific budget

Adoption of New IT Technology Varies in Growth*

• SD-WAN adoption is experiencing more growth with $1-$10M organizations (16%) than with organizations >$1B (8%)
• MPLS Expansion sees large growth with organizations >$1B (53%), and steady growth with $1M-$10M (26%), $10M-$100M and $100M-$1B (35% each)
• Cloud Adoption highest among organizations with revenue $10M-$100M (12%)
• Physical Servers most popular among organizations with revenue $100M-$1B (26%)
• UCaaS Adoption most popular among organizations with revenue $10M-$100M (14%)

* Note: Percentages in this category measured in RDI, which represents year-over-year shifts

For more information and analysis, you can download the full report here

The End User Angle

Clearly AVANT Analytics will give Trusted Advisors a leg-up on competition. Providing real-time insight into which services are working best for organizations of all sizes is a resource that could very well prove invaluable to the market. The question is how that benefits end users and tech managers.

The simple answer is that the benefit lies in partnering with these Trusted Advisors. We’ve written plenty of articles at TechDecisions about choosing the right partner for your technology needs.

More and more organizations are utilizing IT providers to aide and assist in setting up and managing the IT infrastructure. What an AVANT Trusted Advisor now has is more data to better suit those goals.

I’m not saying that our audience should only go with AVANT Trusted Advisors. What I’m saying is that our audience should hold those Trusted Advisors accountable as the program continues to evolve.

Related: My TechDecision Podcast – Episode 69, Drew Lydecker of AVANT Communications

When vetting a potential partner, if they are an AVANT Trusted Advisor, you can now ask them for actionable data insights that back up whatever technology they recommend for your organization.

If your partner has that information at their disposal, then you have every right to ask them to present that information to help make their business case.

Remember, IT providers work for your organization. You pay them to provide the best service for your organizational needs. I’m personally very excited about the AVANT Analytics program – if it works the way they say, it provides an incredible amount of business intelligence.

However, I’m excited only as far as that intelligence is used to further the needs of the end user organizations that partner with Trusted Advisors.

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