Driving Business Success in an Information Economy

As Singapore celebrates its 50th year of independence this month, many people are reminded that it is a truly remarkable feat for a young nation to have achieved so much in such a short time. Not many would have expected this once sleepy fishing village to transform into the global financial hub and economic powerhouse we see today.

The country now leads in network readiness, ease of doing business, healthcare and communication systems. Its strong growing GDP belies a small country just 714.3 square kilometers (roughly half the size of Los Angeles) with limited natural resources, epitomizing an ideal city-state maintaining the balance between competitiveness and continued growth.

Looking at this “Little Red Dot,” I tend to compare it with businesses today that are often struggling with a similar dilemma of limited and shrinking resources.

Singapore’s success story is a reminder for growing businesses to not be daunted by challenges and growing pains as they look to implement measures in order to remain competitive and ready for an information-driven global economy. The key is to play it smart, be quick to find new opportunities, and accomplish more with less.

Find Business Gold in Intelligence

For companies facing the challenge of managing growing workloads, the sheer size, diversity, and rapid growth of the digital universe can be daunting. IDC predicts that by 2020, the amount of data in our digital universe is expected to grow ten-fold, from 4.4 trillion GB in 2013 to 44 trillion GB.

Companies can look beyond the complexities of managing their data to identify the best opportunities, but the secret to building a smarter business lies in the highest-value, target-rich data. Today’s Big Data technologies make it possible for businesses to integrate terabytes of storage for insights into virtually anything.

Such analytic platforms are enabling organizations to weave data hay into business gold and uncover customer, business and operational insights from data lakes that can be used to optimize key business processes or uncover new growth opportunities. Done right, this value can be a game-changer for business.

Feel the Need for Speed

“You snooze, you lose.” The pressure is on especially as customers are demanding more in less time. Easy access to technology is also giving more opportunity for new start-ups to challenge established companies. Speed is said to have become the new currency of business.

The best businesses are the ones who can respond quickly and react. How can they do it? Today’s flash technologies consolidate and optimize IT to bring businesses the speed they need to drastically improve performance and efficiency in their enterprise data centers. When the data center is agile across the entire IT infrastructure, enterprises can better adapt and respond to dynamic business conditions.

Consolidate Workloads for Effectiveness

Data centers today require the ultimate in business agility to support workload demands while addressing issues of a growing digital universe and increased operation costs. Traditional models of business units and corresponding IT resources working in silos with specific infrastructure for each unit are no longer effective.

With new technological innovations today, businesses no longer need to implement costly, rigid silo architectures for their IT needs. Converged infrastructure appliances offer an alternative solution.

In keeping pace with the changing IT landscape, businesses which deploy effective converged infrastructure solutions improve overall IT effectiveness, while adding greater flexibility, scalability, and ease-of-deployment at a lower long-term cost than silo architectures.

As with Singapore’s journey from a fishing village to the global village, businesses both large and small face growing pains. In today’s rapidly changing business and IT landscape, the challenge is for companies to stay resilient and agile. Businesses that start leveraging technological innovations to give them intelligence, speed and effectiveness will find they have an edge over the competition, and consequently, be better positioned to redefine the next 50 years of their business.

About the Author: Eric Goh