GUEST BLOG: The digital transformation

By Kevin Flanagan, general manager, Pivotal Ireland

‘Digital disruption’ is changing the way businesses operate in Ireland, with business leaders increasingly needing to be able to ‘catch consumers in the act’ in order to influence behaviours and change outcomes.

There are a number of examples where digital transformation is already taking place in sectors across the Irish market. For example, in healthcare, doctors are now able to use apps to link into vital patient stats quickly so that they can offer more personalised advice, as well as gain a clearer view of the patient’s lifestyle. This could be as simple as using a wearable device to track movement, exercise, or the patient’s heart rate.

We’re seeing similar disruption taking place in the telecoms industry. Mobile network operators are already taking advantage of consumer data to map footfall in specific areas. In time, this incredibly valuable information could be used to predict future scenarios, like congestion to actively reroute traffic, or to provide emergency medical services with best route options in real-time to get to patients as quickly as possible.

While this rapid pace of change and increased consumer choice offers more opportunities, it also presents a multitude of challenges – with the first being for organisations to remain competitive.

Reflecting this, it will be interesting to see the European Commission continue to reveal its priorities for a digital single market Europe to simplify regulation in a bid to help companies become more responsive to trends.

This also coincides with plans to potentially launch an enquiry into current market domination by US tech giants such as Facebook.

THE NEXT GENERATION

In the digital era, organisations need to dramatically improve their time to market.

This is due to competitive pressure from niche players and disruptors as well as higher expectations from their customers for immediacy of service and response. With Pivotal Cloud Foundry, we’re pioneering an open vision for cloud-based computing, enabling continuous availability for applications and delivery of business innovation. It’s the result of collaborative industry efforts to build an open platform for next-generation software development.

Organisations are looking to deliver superior digital experiences to customers through compelling and relevant services, applications and promotions

Organisations are looking to deliver superior digital experiences to customers through compelling and relevant services, applications and promotions. To do that, they need to be able to innovate at scale and increase automation; processing large data sets to take intelligent action.

Pivotal Big Data Suite (BDS) enables them to do that through the development and deployment of apps at scale, enabling them to capture more relevant data and perform deep analytics with powerful data science capabilities.

For instance, if you are a retailer and you want to improve customer loyalty and retention, you may want to offer repeat customers personalised offers based on previous purchase history.

We understand the business challenges our customers face and to support them we announced the open sourcing of the core components of BDS in a major strategy update earlier this year, before making a series of further upgrades to the platform.

As a result, we are now delivering an open, flexible and cloud-ready big data portfolio, complete with powerful new entitlements for increased data agility and rapid application scaling capabilities.

THE RIGHT PLATFORM

Apache Hadoop has become the dominant platform for big data analytics, thanks to its ability to serve developers, web start-ups and IT enterprises simultaneously. Hadoop was originally developed in 2003 by data scientists and in recent years, has been primarily adopted by enterprises that need to gain actionable insight from big data.

For enterprises using proprietary data solutions, transitioning to Hadoop can be challenging, and integration with existing infrastructure can present obstacles.

To this end, Pivotal offers its enterprise-grade Hadoop distribution, Pivotal HD, as part of Pivotal Big Data Suite. The business benefits of using this type of platform include enhanced scalability and flexibility.