by Angela Guess
Dan Woods recently wrote in Forbes, “‘You can’t handle the truth.’ We all remember Jack Nicholson’s iconic words in A Few Good Men as a seminal moment in pop culture. Yet, that statement has a lot of relevance for companies and their data architecture. When they look at their architecture, businesses should be asking themselves: ‘Can we handle the truth?’ Big data has created a new reality in which companies have more data at their disposal than ever before. However, just because you have more data doesn’t mean you’re any closer to discovering the real truth. If you don’t have the proper infrastructure in place to seamlessly integrate all your data, from all your sources, you risk not only producing data siloes, but also making decisions on partial truths. For businesses of all sizes, this can have a dramatic impact.”
Woods continues, “For instance, a clothing chain might be able to review customer transactions, but not their browsing history, meaning they have only limited insight into customer behavior. Having customer info spread across multiple applications, none of which are speaking to each other, can greatly impair the effectiveness of your data analytics. There is an alternative. A converged architecture changes basic assumptions about applications. Instead of using the current application paradigm in which batch, transactional, and streaming applications are all separated, with a converged architecture you can employ all or parts of your application patterns into one to get to a single version of truth. The availability of a converged architecture allows companies to foster creativity and spur innovation. Let’s take a look at how employing this architecture can improve your business.”
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