Finding Bottlenecks, Supporting Demanding Apps Keys to Surviving a Tough 2009

January 19, 2009

As businesses settle into an unsettling economy, long-standing concerns are being addressed from a new perspective. The challenge was once to move, manage, protect, and recover exploding data
volumes. The challenge now is to do it in less time, with fewer resources, and on a tighter budget. The coming year will see movement from big names that come with a cost customers can’t afford to pay anymore toward real solutions that save or make money by solving “now problems” efficiently while reducing total cost of ownership and producing return in less than 12 months.

Listen to the Podcast:

IT groups are now more than ever charged with delivering competitive positions to their organizations. Business intelligence (BI) empowers users to make crucial competitive decisions. But even the best BI solution is worthless if the data become stale. To keep data actionable, IT groups will first have to identify where their data movement bottlenecks are and recognize that they are only going to get worse. They will also need to anticipate which applications will experience the highest growth in data volumes. Prioritizing this list of applications and bottlenecks will provide a springboard for cutting processing time and addressing pressure points of business user requirements. This should always be the top priority. The faster the data integration (DI), the more timely and actionable the data.

One other word of advice in this economic climate: IT groups with failing enterprise data integration solutions should take a deep breath before deciding to rip out and replace a flawed system. A data processing slow-down is usually not a reflection of the entire solution, but rather a result of individual bottlenecks that cause isolated pain points throughout the organization. Complementing an existing solution with performance accelerator software could provide the boost needed to get information back into the hands of business users when they need it instead of when it’s too late.

In short, 2009 will likely be all about looking for the cost and processing efficiencies rarely found in high-priced, big name vendors. IT groups should invest now to save costs and in ways where the return is more than 100 percent within 12 months. The IT groups that don’t take this approach are risking their ability to deliver that competitive position.

–Harvey Tessler is the Senior Vice President of Marketing for Syncsort.

Posted by Carl · Filed Under Interviews