Why It’s Essential to Embrace Hybrid Data

If you package and ship data like cartons of sugar – standard-sized, easily stacked, and easily pulled from the shelf – it would be simpler to manage. Unfortunately, it’s not. Because organizations store data in so many different forms and places, extracting the sweet, fine grains of insight from hybrid data is a complex, cumbersome task.

Data is hybrid in every way. The days are long gone when all of an organization’s text reports and databases live comfortably in a data center. Data exists on-premises, in the cloud, at the edge, and in smart devices outside the organization. Hybrid data also comes in different dimensions: structured, unstructured, and semi-structured. It can be raw, cleansed, or exquisitely prepared. It is stored in different forms (text, video, audio) with different time elements (historical, time series, and real-time) and shelf-life requirements (durable and ephemeral).

In short, hybrid data encompasses every facet of data. Using its power can be game-changing for organizations both large and small.

Don’t Ignore Hybrid Data (By the Way, Your Competition Doesn’t)

It is essential to embrace hybrid data, if only just to keep pace with competitors. Data is critical to delivering competitive differentiation to forward-thinking organizations. Hybrid data, and the ability to harness it in all its forms, can deliver sustainable competitive advantage.

Across every industry, time to insight is a key success factor. Gaining insight on shifts in industry trends and consumer preferences faster than the competition can make a material difference in an organization’s ability to compete and win in real-time markets. Your competition uses hybrid data. Your shareholders demand it.

Hybrid Data is Only Limited by Your Imagination

Having access to hybrid data, with its numerous dimensions, provides the ability to envision more use cases.

Many companies want a 360-degree view of their customer, but to fuel this view, you’ll need hybrid data that enables you to correlate social media feeds with customer IDs and activities of website visitors and application users.

Others want to detect fraud in real time by blending transactional data with graph-based relationship data to flag and isolate rogue actors. Digital transformation requires effective use of all the data you have, and quite possibly adding more sources.

Consider how hybrid data changed the game for one financial services institution in the United Kingdom where regulations require it to produce a risk exposure report at the end of each trading day. This business had to cover three billion risk data points across 30 different risk portfolios in one hour. The institution knew that its systems, which ran 30 separate reports, couldn’t meet these reporting requirements. A hybrid data system of record solved this challenge, enabling the institution to run a single report integrating all 30 risk categories in seconds.

Hybrid Data Can Fundamentally Change Your Business

Analyzing the latest data, refreshed from relevant sources, yields timely and accurate insights. With hybrid data in hand, you can gain a true 360-degree view of your customer. You will learn more about true customer behavior by including relevant information you have on purchases, social media sentiment, website clickstream data, customer support data, and more. You can use that multi-dimensional intelligence to drive personalized ads and next-best offers.

Picture a scenario where a travel and tourism brand can micro-target two different consumers based on cross analysis of real-time consumer behavior and third-party data. Rather than serving up the same generic ad, the brand delivers focused relevant offers to each distinct persona. A business offers the 45-year-old father of two who’s been tweeting about fall foliage a family-themed vacation in New England. The 20-year-old college student with museum memberships and Instagram posts about hip-hop receives a getaway offer show casing museum tours and a diverse array of local concert halls.

Organizations need patience to manage the expanding universe of hybrid data. They also need tools. The Actian Data Platform makes it easy for organizations to optimize the value of their data, wherever it lives, and whatever form it is in. Running analytics on data where it resides saves time and resources. The platform provides distinctive capabilities such as blazing fast analytics, real-time data ingestion, enterprise scale and a true hybrid data architecture so you can make decisions in the business moment.

Embracing hybrid data empowers you and takes you from data as a pain point to data as capital to drive growth, innovation, and revenue.

How Can You Embrace Hybrid Data?

Try the Actian Data Platform free trial to explore your hybrid data use cases with a single platform for data analytics, integration, and management.

About Teresa Wingfield

Teresa Wingfield is Director of Product Marketing at Actian where she is responsible for communicating the unique value that the Actian Data Platform delivers, including proven data integration, data management and data analytics. She brings a 20-year track record of increasing revenue and awareness for analytics, security, and cloud solutions. Prior to Actian, Teresa managed product marketing at industry-leading companies such as Cisco, McAfee, and VMware.