To succeed in today’s fast-paced digital economy, companies must synthesize vast volumes of data from existing and new applications in order to better serve their customer needs through automation, smarter interactions, and real-time information. The challenge is for enterprises to optimize new technologies that transform their data infrastructure and support new digital operational models. Research recently published by Harvard Business Review found that enterprises that had digitally transformed their organizations (“digital leaders”) outperformed those that had not (“digital laggards”). The research was outlined in the article What Companies on the Right Side of the Digital Business Divide Have in Common[1], which examined 344 enterprises listed on U.S. stock exchanges with a median revenue of $3.4 billion across multiple major industries.
The research found significant disparities in financial performance between the top 25 percent of digital leaders, and those defined as digital laggards. Based on three-year averages from 2012-2014 data, the findings were:
- Digital leaders had 55 percent gross margins compared to 37 percent for digital laggards;
- Digital leaders had 18 percent operating margins compared to 10 percent for digital laggards;
- Digital leaders had 11 percent profit margin compared to 7 percent for digital laggards.
Critical to enterprise success with digital transformation appears to be technology choices, as well as operational models. The authors state: “Our research indicates that these leaders approach the digital opportunity with a different strategic mindset and execute on the opportunity with a different operating model. Data and analytics are obviously key. Leading organizations are more likely to have a comprehensive data acquisition strategy and differentiate themselves from competitors based on their data platform.”
The data platform represents the fundamental element of digital transformation in the enterprise infrastructure. As the digital era spawned new forms and higher volumes of data, IT managers struggled to connect data from existing operational systems with new digital applications driving engagement and innovation. The goal now is to digitally transform infrastructures with a data platform capable of connecting organizational data stores from across the data center to support new data-driven initiatives. This requires new technologies that optimize legacy assets to extract a more comprehensive view of data for actionable insights.
The EDB Postgres™ Platform is the first integrated open source-based database management platform that brings together all of the components required for managing structured and unstructured data. It creates a cohesive data management fabric that accommodates new digital business and operational models by integrating legacy systems and emerging big data solutions. By integrating data from existing systems of record with new applications of engagement, the EDB Postgres Platform enables seamless, 360-degree customer views without data silos. Organizations can bridge the data gap between new and legacy applications to better serve customer needs, thus landing on the winning side of the ‘digital divide.’
The new EDB Postgres Platform 2017 is now generally available with a series of technology enhancements to support advanced analytics, greater data integration, more complex workloads, and greater flexibility in geographic dispersal. (Read the press release here.)
With these new enhancements, the EDB Postgres Platform 2017 has set a new standard in digital business. Based on open source-based standards, the Platform gives enterprises the capability, performance, and reliability they need with the flexibility and ease of provisioning required by modern DevOps.
Keith Alsheimer is Chief Marketing Officer at EnterpriseDB.
[1] Robert Brock, Marco Iansiti & Karim R. Lakhani, What Companies on the Right Side of the Digital Divide Have in Common (Harv. Bus. Rev., Jan. 31, 2017).