Do More With Your Data at Gartner’s Data and Analytics Summit 2019
Michael Grant
“We’re not turning around!” This has been my wife’s mantra for the three decades we’ve been married. Regardless of what may have been left at home, she’s made it clear: “Once we leave the driveway, this car only goes forward”. This used to be an impractical stance. Both she and I remember our parents turning around to make sure the iron was unplugged, or the front door was locked. But today, that’s not an issue. If the anxiety of a “did-you-remember-to” moment strikes after we’ve left home, a quick glance at the phone monitoring our growing IoT network reassures us things are as they should be. While my wife and I like to make grand claims of replacing intuition with information or trading doubt for certainty, our kids keep us in check with sardonic praise about our evolving “21st-century adulting skills”.
Much like my family, corporations today are kept in check by expectant stakeholders and under pressure to drive forward. And like us, they too are actively trading intuition in favor of data-driven decision making. Nowhere can this be seen more clearly than at Gartner’s Data and Analytics Summit. The event has become one of Gartner’s largest aimed at empowering companies with the continuous intelligence and pervasive insights necessary to excel in the digital economy.
Gartner’s fastest growing summit is for leaders responsible for building their firm’s data-centric culture to support digital business transformation. The four-day event draws more than 3000 data and analytics practitioners and leaders that want new ideas, insights on digitization projects and advice on scaling data and analytics projects. That’s why NetApp will be there too. NetApp’s Data Fabric strategy turns traditional application-centric architectures upside down by helping companies put data at the core of their transformation efforts. For more on this, attendees can hear from NetApp’s Executive Cloud Principal, Chris Collins Ph.D., on two key topics; cloud workload placement and using data to maximize business outcomes. Dr. Collins first session “Minimize the Cost of Moving Your Data to the Public Cloud” is on Tuesday, March 19 with a second session to follow, “Accelerate the Business Value of Your Data; Transform Your Service Catalog” on Wednesday, March 20th. If you’ll be at the conference, stop by and talk with us at Booth 821. If you’d like a meeting with Dr. Collins or others, let us know using the easy-to-complete form.
This year’s summit is happening March 18 - 21 in Orlando, Florida. There will be more than 150 research-driven sessions across 8 focused tracks providing advice and insight on a diverse set of topics ranging from building a “Data-Centric architecture” to “Digital Ethics and Artificial Intelligence”. With more than 80 analysts in attendance, every session will be loaded with research findings, practical and actionable steps, and opportunities to network with other data and analytics professionals.
All trends are pointing to 2019 becoming a tipping point for digital business transformation. As companies connect more devices and more data, they find innovation breaks out across their originations for the benefit of employees, shareholders and most import, customers. In short, it’s clear that with more connected data comes more value. And as more data is connected and shared, my wife’s trope gains more truth: “we’re not turning around”.
Michael Grant
Michael is a marketer by profession, technologist by accident and endlessly curious by nature. He has been obsessed with the intersection of business and technology for well over two decades. When at home in Austin TX, his wife and their six daughters have learned to cheerfully tolerate his disruptive carpentry and gardening projects.
