We are living through extraordinary times. The scale of the COVID-19 impact has not been witnessed by any of us in our living memory. Business models are about to undergo a sea change. Organisations will have to redefine the way they cater to their Customers, Partners, Suppliers, Patients and Citizens.

And to do this they need a simple yet robust and scalable Data management platform – that enables them to understand the data, govern the data and derive value from the data that they have. However there are many challenges:

• Data Silos – clients have accumulated data over many years which has resulted in Data Silos
• Data Preparation – Data Scientists seem to be spending 50-80% time on finding and preparing data
• Increased demand for Self-Service – More business users today want to access data and build their own reports without support from IT
• Cloud vs On-prem – And there is this perennial debate about On-prem vs Cloud. Some organizations simply can’t decide between these two. In today’s scenario, smart enterprises have deployed best of breed technologies. They have Core applications such as ERPs, Core banking, Policy Admin systems on-prem, while the Data lakes, BI and Analytical tools are implemented in a mixed method – with some on-prem and some on cloud – resulting in a very complex data landscape. So it is no longer an “either-or” decision. It is both. So the need of the hour is to have a platform that supports a Hybrid approach.

This is where IBM’s Cloud Pak for Data comes in.

What is IBM Cloud Pak for Data

It is an Enterprise Insights Platform that allows you to collect, organize all the enterprise data, democratize information via a knowledge Catalog  that supports projects that generates predictions, insights and visualizations.

IBM has defined 4 steps in the AI Journey: Collect, Organise, Analyse and Infuse.

It is important to note that we can collect data from any repository without physically moving the data using a technology called Data Virtualization. Then we can organize the data into an Enterprise data catalog. This capability allows you to Shop for data and also enforces Data Quality and Governance across all data sources. Then Users can grab data from the catalog and immediately start working on Data Science and Analytics projects. All this can be done in hours as opposed to days – helping you accelerate your business at speed of thought.

Now you can see how powerful the platform is.

So what type of applications can we deploy on CP4D platform?

Our clients are using the CP4D platform to reduce complexity and enable scale. Any application that requires processing large volumes of data are candidates for the Platform.

• Data Lakes and Data Warehouse
• MDM and Entity Analytics
  • Customer 360
  • Doctor 360
  • Patient 360
  • Product 360
  • Distributor 360
• Analytics and AI

At Alpharithm, using all the experience from implementing traditional Business 360 solutions, we have created assets and accelerators that increases the speed to market and reduce the costs.

One such solution is called SiNGL. Typical MDM solution would take 12 to 24 months to implement. However with SiNGL on CP4D, we are able to shrink it to 3 to 6 months.

Alpharithm’s SiNGL

SiNGL provides the following business benefits:

• Enhanced Customer experience
• Improved Customer retention
• Increased Upsell and Cross sell
• Optimized Supply chain
• Increased Product conversion

It also provides numerous intangible benefits such as:

• Improved Data Quality and Continuous measurement of Data Quality
• End to End Data Governance
• Faster access to Master data (single source of truth) by various applications including AI

Is this the right time to invest?

We see this is the question on everyone’s mind. The short answer is Yes.

History has shown that Organizations who had a vision of the future and invested in technology – specifically in data and analytics during the downtime, reaped maximum benefit when normalcy returned. For Instance, take the 2008 Credit crunch. Financial services organizations and Insurance companies re-invented themselves which led to the evolution of FinTech and InsureTech.

More recently, COVID-19 has shown that organizations that invested in Digital transformation including  Hybrid cloud not only survived but were able to continue to service their customers efficiently despite the nationwide lockdown.

Now, Most of us still under lockdown and are working from home. So let us use this time to research, learn and deploy the right solution within the Enterprise and become a data driven organization.