Enterprise architects, like Formula One teams, live and die by how technology serves changing requirements.
‘Show the business how technology empowers success … or suffer the embarrassment of technology putting your business in second place.’
In 2010, Formula 1 racecar engineer Adrian Newey introduced a radical new exhaust blown diffuser, a pull-rod suspension, and carefully sculpted nose to send Red Bull to victory. Although the diffuser was banned in 2011, Newey deployed a range of new technologies and took RedBull-Renault and driver Sebastian Vettel to Championships four years in a row. Unfortunately, in the 2014 Championship, the Redbull team didn’t adapt to new regulations and failed to earn podium positions in most races.
Enterprise architects and Chief Technology Officers also depend on technology to serve changing requirements.
The speed of business has accelerated, and many major industries are being turned upside down. Many companies have invested heavily in technology, only to be left with a disparate, dysfunctional data environment that dampens their ability to compete. In a recent press release, Arvind Bedi, director of IT at Cisco Systems, described the challenge, saying “The entire market is starting to realize that data is everywhere and an agile ecosystem is paramount.”
The 2014 Championship: Why did Mercedes rule the roost?
In the 2014 Championship, team Mercedes were able to take advantage of the new small capacity hybrid turbo engines and kinetic engine recovery system (ERS-K) with drivers Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg taking top Drivers’ Champion and Pole Trophy awards. Mercedes success can be attributed to engineer the new power unit with energy recovery system to run reliably on their moulded, carbon fibre chassis.
The pace of change in Enterprise Architecture
Ensuring technology empowers businesses to compete and win is much like the challenge of putting together a winning F1 car. But unlike Formula 1 engineers, architects don’t have the luxury of rebuilding their machines from scratch every few years. To make matters more difficult, EAs must adapt their machines to meet business requirements that may change much more frequently than Formula 1 seasons pass.
Ripping-out-and-replacing existing infrastructure is not viable within most large enterprises. Chief Technology Officers require approaches that enable teams to build business applications across existing infrastructure e.g. data warehouses, ERP systems and operational data stores while helping them to take advantage of the latest big data technologies like Apache Hadoop.
A chassis on which to build big data applications
The Aptitude™ platform has long been used to build enterprise applications that run across relational databases, data warehouses and other systems. Version 5 extends this capability bringing wide support for Hadoop. The platform excels at addressing the requirement to rapidly process massive datasets using in-memory and in-database processing, and the support for in-Hadoop processing will empower enterprises to take advantage of this latest technology alongside their existing big data infrastructure.
Get in touch
To learn more about how the Aptitude platform enables enterprise architects to take advantage of new and existing big data infrastructure, or to have a demonstration of our innovative graphical Hadoop interfaces, please contact us.
