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The Aptitude Blog

Key Themes and Takeaways from IPEXPO & Teradata Conferences

November 6, 2014
Posted by Sarah Werner

Over the last few weeks, I have had the opportunity to attend the IPEXPO Europe conference in London and the Teradata 2014 PARTNERS Conference and Expo in Nashville, TN. At both conferences there were overarching themes about how companies can make better use of their data – to move from data collection and production of static reports to near real-time, actionable data that can be consumed across an organization. The following themes were some of the interesting takeaways I left with. All three areas reflect the need for agility within IT organizations to allow them to respond quickly and with scale to changing business climates.

 The Future of the Application Development Platform: Empowering Agility

Many trends that have permeated the consumer world are starting to naturally drip into the internal workings of the enterprise. The self-service capabilities we have come to expect from our banks and retail outlets, we now expect when accessing information within our own organizations. IT and Business leaders are working to balance broad, real-time availability of information with required security features, bandwidth requirements and privacy controls.

Since many current enterprise architectures are fundamentally rigid it is crucial to have a software layer on top of your IT architecture foundation that can help your company immediately react to changing market conditions. Companies were very receptive to learning more about our flexible application development platform with a graphical user interface that empowers business leaders to immediately respond to requests for information in a timely and scalable manner.

The Sentient Enterprise: Autonomous Decision Making

Oliver Ratzesberger, Senior Vice President-Software at Teradata, discussed his vision for the future of the organization, which includes the potential for sentient, responsive enterprises driven by autonomous decision making. While this may seem like a far off possibility, the ever-increasing automation of business processes and the Internet of Things is bringing this vision closer.

To stay relevant, business processes need to be flexible and reflect evolving business models and changing economic conditions. While we continue to move away from time consuming, manual IT work, human input is still essential so it is important to have a platform where business users can actively collaborate with IT colleagues to easily oversee and change the processes. This is perhaps best done within a low code environment where there is no requirement for the business people to significantly reskill but instead can focus on what they are good at which is creating real commercial value.

 Big Data: The Importance of Privacy

I was lucky enough to attend a talk delivered by Doug Cutting, Chief Architect at Cloudera and Creator of Hadoop. Interestingly the focus of this talk was controlling data privacy and it was clear the value and importance Cutting placed on making sure personal data is protected. A number of companies have suffered damaging press because of misuse or misappropriation of personal data and as people increasingly become more concerned and protective over their own data, these slips are likely to be even more damaging.

It is vital for organizations to fully understand the flow and transformation of personal data within their systems for privacy reasons. To achieve this it is necessary for managers and auditors to have an insight into the actual code that is moving the data around their system. The range of so called ‘low or no code’ application development platforms can help one achieve this goal.

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This blog post was written by:

Sarah Werner
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