Data as a Service: A Framework for Providing Reusable Enterprise Data Services

Guest Introduction

With the advent of social media and the Internet of Things (IoT), businesses are receiving a lot more data than they ever did in the past. The volume of data is increasing exponentially, the variety is increasing, and so is the velocity of its arrival. Companies who can analyze this data, derive insights and share their learnings across business lines within the company and with the ecosystem of partners externally in an effective manner to transform their businesses are invariably the ones who are going to win. This specific trend has been captured in Accenture's Technology Vision 2013 as “Data Velocity” and “Design for Analytics” and again in 2014 as “Data Supply Chain.” Personally, as a Managing Director of Accenture, I have seen this trend resonate with our Fortune 500 clients across Accenture's five Operating Groups: Communications, Media & High Tech, Financial Services, Health and Public Services, Resources, and Products.

Given the need to consume data from heterogeneous sources, both internal and external to a company, hosted either in premises or in the cloud, and on the flip side, to make its own data available in exactly the same reuseable form for partners to consume, companies can no longer afford to keep data locked into silos of applications, nor can they treat it as a second class object when it comes to architecting its IT infrastructure. Data needs to be decoupled from applications so that the data generated by one application can be used ...