Data Virtualization-as-a-Service Part 1: Data is a Competitive Opportunity

These expert insights are a part of Solutions Review’s Thought Leaders, the resource hub of thought leadership content from InsightJam.com.

Everyone’s competitive landscape has changed.

• Before, we competed locally; today, it’s a global market.
• Before, we could win with better suppliers and superior distribution. Today, everyone has access to everything.
• Before, we could ride a product’s success for many years. Product life cycles are short today, and stickiness has become more challenging.

Yet one opportunity remains; driving competitive business value from your data.

In a Q3 2022 TDWI, respondents stated the three most important business drivers behind data platform, management, and integration modernization were:

1. Observe and enhance customer experiences across channels and drive more intelligent marketing, sales, engagement, and support
2. Increase operational efficiency
3. 0Generate new business strategies and models.

Let us explore these three business drivers further.

Superior Customer Experiences

Will you win as the organization that provides the best customer experiences? Data helps you better understand your customer engagement points, provide compelling experiences, and motivate your customers to buy more.

A 2022 Gartner survey2 noted that 84% of customer service and service support leaders cited customer data and analytics as “very or extremely important” for achieving their organizational goals in 2023.

Armed with properly integrated data, you can draw deliberate distinctions between customer segments, explicitly target those that best align with your offerings, and give those customers exactly what they want.

Operational Excellence

Will you compete using your business processes to out-execute your competitors?

Optimizing your operations requires a deep understanding of what happened, what is happening now, and what will happen. With this data, you can drive an even better outcome.

IDC recently predicted that by 2024, 30% of industrial organizations would have become leaner and more agile than their competitors due to making real-time operational insights available anytime, anywhere, to anyone.3

Take supply chain operations as an example. You and your competitors might share suppliers and distributors. But you can still win if you can use real-time data to react faster to inevitable disruptions, become a better partner, and uncover hundreds of minor optimizations that, when combined, create a formidable advantage.

Game-Changing Innovation

Will you out-innovate your competitors by bringing compelling new products and services to market?

Data is the most crucial ingredient in your R&D tool kit as it informs your experiments, project status, trial results, etc.

Data can also add value to your offerings. Here is one example.

As revenues were dropping due to price-based competition, a European-based global supplier of compressors changed the game by recognizing that their customers wanted compressed air, not compressors per se. They started instrumenting their equipment with data-gathering sensors, predictive maintenance algorithms, and other data-driven capabilities integrated using data virtualization. Once complete, they could offer an innovative new product, compressed air as a service.