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August 2018

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The proliferation of data types and quantities should be a major advantage for enterprise organizations. More data and more types of data should offer complex insights into challenges and opportunities in how the business runs and should lead to better decisions and business outcomes. However, ask any data analyst, and they’ll share this reality: data analysts spend a bulk of their time on search, data preparation, management, and governance activities, and not on data analytics where the true value lies.

Seven years ago, I embarked on my smart home journey, although I didn’t know it at the time. Being an avid gamer and student in college, I subscribed to a broadband internet service and setup my wireless home network. This allowed me to compete in online video games through my gaming console, connect my laptop to the internet, and stream movies on my tablet. What I didn’t realize back then was that I had just laid the necessary infrastructure in my home to support a lifestyle of comfort, convenience, security, and cost savings that I would come to enjoy seven years later.

Twenty years ago, I went to my first NHL game, and was lucky enough to join five other friends in a luxury box overlooking the rink at center ice. Shortly after arrival, a server showed up to take our drink orders, and in an effort to get our drinks quickly and watch the game, we all ordered the same thing. The server dutifully took them down, punched them into his handheld device, and processed our order. Moments later, by the time he had finished, our drinks arrived from another server. What sort of magic was this? A server can bring us our drink orders in the time it takes us to order? Can he do it again? The answer to that last question was ‘yes,’ even when we ordered complex (and to his delight, more expensive) cocktails.

Organizations rely on SaaS to introduce new capabilities to the business, accelerate time to value, and efficiently provide mobile workers with ubiquitous access to applications and information. “SaaS has been around for more than a decade. IT and business users have learned to trust in the reliability and security of today’s SaaS applications, facilitating a more strategic and integrated approach to SaaS adoption as a step toward transformation,” according to Frank Della Rosa, research director for SaaS and Cloud Software.