What to do with your company’s unending information overload

In its latest annual analysis of the fastest-growing firms in Singapore, credit and business-information bureau DP Information Group found that 217 companies here managed to turn in net profit and achieve at least 10 per cent turnover growth each year over the last three years.

More Singapore companies are emerging with significant competitive strengths of their own and are now expanding into international markets.

The massive explosion in data is creating manageability issues for companies around the world due to factors such as increased mergers and acquisitions, and a surge in both structured and unstructured data.

According to one estimate, data at a typical organization doubles every 18 months for critical business applications. And for some specialized applications, such as telecommunications call data records, data can quadruple in that same period.

At the same time, tighter regulations involving the tracking of financial transactions and customer data put the responsibility on businesses to maintain this data and keep it available for years.

These data-volume challenges are incredibly costly, as companies must purchase and maintain hardware to handle the load. These multiple data warehouses and transaction systems add up to a high total cost of ownership and require constant oversight. In addition to data volume and storage, business itself is happening at an incredible rate.

Businesses increasingly need to react faster to events impacting their operations. They must be able to uncover trends and patterns to improve planning and forecasting, increase their response time to customer requests and complaints, and arm their sales force with the information required to close the deal, as the deal is happening.

To achieve these goals, businesses must have direct insight into transactional information as business events occur, without waiting to extract and load that data from data warehouses. However, the volume of operational data available for business insight often exceeds the amount of data that traditional disk-based systems and data warehouses can process within reasonable response times. Companies today need to be able to answer questions on the fly based on real-time data.

In-Memory Technology to the Rescue
In-memory computing technology allows the processing of massive quantities of transactional data in the main memory of the server to provide immediate results from analysis of these transactions. Since in-memory technology allows data to be accessed directly from memory, query results come back much more quickly than they would from a traditional disk-based warehouse. The time is takes to update the database is also significantly reduced, and the system can handle more queries at one time.

The elements of in-memory computing are not new, but they are now at a point where common adoption is possible. Recent improvements in hardware economics and technology innovations in software have now made it possible for massive amounts of data to be sifted, correlated and updated in seconds based on in-memory technology.

How Do Businesses Benefit?
In-memory technology promises impressive benefits in cost savings, enhanced efficiency and greater immediate visibility across the enterprise that enables improved decision making.

Cost savings
Database management currently accounts for more than 25 percent of a company’s IT budget. Since in-memory databases use hardware systems that require far less power than traditional database management systems, they dramatically reduce hardware and maintenance costs.
In-memory databases also reduce the burden on a company’s overall IT landscape, freeing up resources previously devoted to responding to requests for reports.
Increased simplicity and efficiency
In-memory computing allows any business user to easily carve out subsets of business intelligence for convenient departmental usage. Work groups can operate autonomously without affecting the central data warehouse workload. And perhaps most importantly, business users no longer have to rely on IT support resources to gain relevant insight into business data.
Improved visibility to make better business decisions
In-memory technology makes it easier for organizations to gain complete oversight into the full range of their business data rather than limited insight into a subset of that data which has been extracted and put in a data warehouse. With this improved visibility, businesses can shift from after-event analysis to real-time decision making – and move the business model from response-based to predictive and planning.

Changing the Way Business Works
According to one estimate, approximately 30 percent of enterprises will have one or more critical applications running on an in-memory database over the next five years, and by 2014, 30 percent of analytic applications will use in-memory functions to add scale and computational speed.
For those who move first to in-memory technology, the resulting boost in business insight, increased efficiency and reduced IT costs will give a true competitive advantage. 

Kowshik Sriman, Managing Director for SAP Singapore