Promises of the ‘Innovation Loop’ to make transformations REAL

Authored by Rajesh Janey, President and Managing Director, India Enterprise, Dell EMC

With human and machine partnership moving towards the next level, data is gaining more prominence than ever. In today’s data-driven world, the success of this partnership hinges very much on two core elements: Leveraging machine to gain valuable insights from data and making machines smarter. To put it simply, as the variety and velocity of data being produced are increasing exponentially, we require machines to quickly analyze and make sense of these data. It will ultimately result in actionable insights for human counterparts to take final decisions. 

It’s with this powerful set of insights that organizations are starting to realize that data has value — and potentially, a lot of it. Some are finding that their data itself is their most valuable asset. However, the major challenge remains unlocking the true value of these data to deliver business outcomes. Going forward, the volume and velocity of data growth will completely overwhelm our ability to harness its value. As a result, we will need broad categories of systems, powered by the rapidly maturing field of artificial intelligence to analyze, inform and act with us or on our behalf, empowering us to achieve things that were never possible before. This new ability to process a vast amount of data on a scale greater than ever before and then, provide rich insights from this data holds the key to being successful in this new era. 

And precisely, this is where the importance of Innovation Loop comes to play. Organizations need to master this innovation loop to harness the power of data successfully. A sustainable strategy of traversing the path in the innovation loop will help organizations garner the ability to sustain their edge in the market. 

The Competitive Edge of Innovation Loop 

Innovation loop is comprised of three core elements. 

The first stage is Sense, which focuses on collecting all data, generating from different sources, including new engaging and immersive mobile and cloud-based applications as well as the explosion of IoT cameras, Sensors, lightbulbs, cars, and even people. Needless to add, this data is coming to us at a lightning-fast pace, leading to a significant increase in the volume, velocity, size, and the complexity of data. 

The second stage revolves around Make Sense: Now you have a mountain of data. But how would you make sense out of it and create what is called actionable insights? And this is where machine learning, artificial intelligence, and deep learning play a critical role. 

And the final stage is the action itself. This could be executed by the AI system itself or surfaced to a human for high-end decisions. To put it in another way, the act could be done either by machines or human beings working on machines. 

To realize its digital destiny, an organization should continue on this loop at an accelerated pace. And it needs to renew its perspective of all the stages of this loop. For example, in the Sense stage, an organization can expand its focus to cover new technologies like IoT to get real-time information, while in the second stage, new-age technologies like core or distributed data centers and hybrid clouds as provided by Dell Technologies can be used to analyze data better and faster. Likewise, for the Act stage, cutting-edge technologies like Virtual Reality and advances in Augmented Reality can be leveraged to create a new set of interface between humans and machine. 

Nevertheless, with this innovation loop, emerge several questions around security. No longer, we are only responsible for protecting the data center. Time has come for organizations to adopt a data-centric security approach to secure their data wherever it may reside, as data is now spread across the whole chain from collection to deep archival. The new security paradigm, therefore, must focus on protecting and preserving this data throughout its lifecycle. 

It signifies that customers should gain the ability to run it on either the data centre or in an hybrid environment, using any cloud. Further, given the size and ubiquity of data, it’s important for organizations to abstract data from the hardware layer. Software defined infrastructure and multi-cloud, therefore, are two important tenets of this innovation cycle. 

Undoubtedly, this transformation isn’t a simple task. And in several cases, it emerges as a whole new ballgame for organizations. Testifying the fact is a survey by ESG, which reveals that over half of those surveyed are struggling to keep pace with the changes. And here we see customers supplementing their in-house capabilities with technological leaders to close any gap that they may have and accelerate their success. 

Dell technologies can play a significant role in your journey to digital transformation, which will help you monetize your assets that is data. We can start and be a partner in “Sense” to create the sensing environment for you. Then, we can move on to “Make Sense” where we have key technologies from all our strategically aligned businesses to help you extract and analyze the data and then, work with you on AR and VR technologies in the “Act” stage. At the same time, our technologies will allow you to run all the applications on a hybrid and multi-cloud environment, make the infrastructure abstract using software-defined, and protect the most important asset of your organization that is data end-to-end. We can also help you define a path and be a partner in your journey through our Consulting and Services portfolio. 

In a nutshell, all the seven companies of Dell technologies family will work together and help you monetize your digital currency - data- in a secure fashion and make you realize their business value. Look forward to partnering with you in your digital journey and make it REAL.