Matt Aslett's Analyst Perspectives

I previously explained how master data management helps provide trust in data, making it one of the most significant aspects of an enterprise’s strategic approach to data management. More recently, I discussed how it has a role to play in accelerating data democratization as part of data intelligence initiatives. Along with data quality, MDM enables organizations to ensure data is accurate, complete and consistent to fulfill operational business objectives. While it is an established and mature...

I wrote recently about the role that data intelligence has in enabling enterprises to facilitate data democratization and the delivery of data as a product. Data intelligence provides a holistic view of how, when, and why data is produced and consumed across an enterprise, and by whom. This information can be used by data teams toensure business users and data analysts are provided with self-service access to data that is pertinent to their roles and requirements. Delivering data as a product...

The development, testing and deployment of data pipelines is a fundamental accelerator of data-driven strategies, enabling enterprises to extract data from the operational applications and data platforms designed to run the business and load, integrate and transform it into the analytic data platforms and tools used to analyze the business. As I explained in our recent Data Pipelines Buyers Guide, data pipelines are essential to generating intelligence from data. Healthy data pipelines are...

As enterprises seek to increase data-driven decision-making, many are investing in strategic data democratization initiatives to provide business users and data analysts with self-service access to data across the enterprise. Such access has long been a goal of many enterprises, but few have achieved it. Only 15% of participants in Ventana Research’s Analytics and Data Benchmark Research say their organization is very comfortable allowing business users to work with data that has not been...

Cloud computing has had an enormous impact on the analytics and data industry in recent decades, with the on-demand provisioning of computational resources providing new opportunities for enterprises to lower costs and increase efficiency. Two-thirds of participants in Ventana Research’s Data Lakes Dynamic Insightsresearch are using a cloud-based environment as the primary data platform for analytics. 

It is well known that data integration, transformation and preparation represent a significant proportion of the time and effort required in any analytics project. Traditionally, operational data platforms are designed to store, manage, and process data to support worker-, customer- and partner-facing operational applications, and data is then extracted, transformed, and loaded (or “ETLed”) into a separate analytic data platform, which is designed to store, manage, process, and analyze data....

I have previously written about the impact of intelligent operational applications on the requirements for data platforms. Intelligent applications are used to run the business but also deliver personalization, recommendations and other features generated by machine learning and artificial intelligence. As such, they require a combination of operational and analytic processing functionality. The emergence of these intelligent applications does not eradicate the need for separate analysis of...

The increasing importance of intelligent operational applications driven by artificial intelligence (AI) is blurring the lines that have traditionally divided the requirements between operational and analytic data platforms. Operational data platforms have traditionally been deployed to support applications targeted at business users and decision-makers to run the business, with analytic data platforms typically supporting applications used by data and business analysts to analyze the business.

In recent years, many enterprises have migrated data platform workloads from on-premises infrastructure to cloud environments, attracted by the promised benefits of greater agility and lower costs. The scale of cloud data platform adoption is illustrated by Ventana Research’s Data Lakes Dynamic Insights research: For two-thirds (66%) of participants, the primary data platform used for analytics is cloud based. As the quantity and importance of the data platform workloads deployed in the cloud...

Ventana Research recently announced its 2024 Market Agenda for Analytics and Data, continuing the guidance we have offered for two decades to help enterprises derive optimal value and improve business outcomes.