By Matthew Oostveen, Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, Asia Pacific & Japan, Pure Storage
The success of some of the world’s largest and best-known companies like Apple, Google, Microsoft, Uber, Airbnb, Spotify, and Amazon stem from the ecosystems, or platforms, that they have built. These platforms have simplified customer experiences and enabled the companies to power new innovations, services and capabilities. It is the reason why they have been disruptors in their respective industries and earned the loyalty of their customers.
A platform is made of building blocks that deliver more value as a whole than the sum of the parts. It enables the delivery of services and the upscaling of capabilities. It connects users and eases interactions, transactions and value creation. By streamlining operations, optimising processes, eliminating silos, and improving communication, platforms bring greater agility in developing and delivering new innovations while reducing risks. Platforms also enable self-service – a convenience that consumers cherish, for everything from hiring a ride to booking a vacation.
Companies that exemplify the power of platforms
Apple is one of the best examples of a platform in the consumer tech world. They have their own silicon, app store, operating systems, and electronic products. And while these products work fine independently, they work even better together – as a well-orchestrated symphony that allows users to synchronise their data and preferences across devices. Software updates are pushed to the users as the platform evolves.
In the B2B space, Cisco offers the Cisco Networking Cloud platform that unifies disjointed solutions and helps IT and security teams deal with the complexity of multiple clouds, myriad third-party apps, IoT, and security threats. NVIDIA, meanwhile, have gone beyond Graphics Processing Units and built an AI platform, AI training services, and AI models – all held together by AI Platform software. This has eased the entry point for their customers into AI.
Applying the platform approach to enterprise data management
Data is the most valuable asset an organisation can have, and the manner in which it is used often determines business outcomes and customer experiences. Data must be available and delivered when it is needed, and with the required level of performance. This calls not for point storage solutions, but for efficient, reliable, and scalable solutions focused on data workflows. It calls, in other words, for a platform approach to enterprise data storage.
An enterprise data management platform should address all the needs pertaining to data acquisition, storage, analysis, governance, and security. It must be able to support large numbers and diverse types of workloads, users, cloud-native deployments, and enterprise applications. Data should be fully integrated, constantly updated, and heavily protected, available only to those authorised to access it. Everything that can be automated should be automated. An enterprise data platform helps in distilling actionable insights from data for powering innovation, improving efficiency, accelerating growth, and enhancing customer experience.
A platform approach can greatly help enterprises manage their data across environments. The platform could be unified by a common operating system that runs across all hardware and is managed by a single “pane-of-glass” management software. This will enable the company to deliver software updates automatically and carry out hardware upgrades non-disruptively, without any downtime to the business.
The organisation should be able to deploy data and apps at any location – at the edge, in the data centre, or in the public cloud. The apps could be modern, traditional, or both. The platform could be used either as-a-service or traditionally, with payment made on either an operational or a capital expenditure basis. Such an arrangement would give the customer the freedom to deploy data services in any conceivable combination – all within a single ecosystem.
Good prospects, looking ahead
Medium-term projections by research firms for the growth of the enterprise data management market vary widely, but they all point to robust growth. According to Fortune Business Insights, the global enterprise data management market was valued at $92.18 billion in 2023 and is projected to grow from $101.04 billion in 2024 to $224.87 billion by 2032 at a CAGR of 10.5 percent.
The era of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is upon us, and enterprise data platforms will have to deliver the performance and the capabilities required for complex AI workloads. There will be a growing need for storage automation solutions and GenAI co-pilots for storage as organisations strive to deliver ROI. Companies that keep pace with the times and adopt the latest technologies have a very good chance of becoming market disruptors. And we know the world loves a good disruptor.