Chapter 3. The Advent of Smart Enterprises and SmartDP

Despite the difficulty of transition in the smart data era, many emerging enterprises rose above others and enhanced their competitiveness with data, which shocked traditional enterprises in all fields. According to the Mobile Internet Report 2016 issued by A16Z, the data giants represented by GAFA (Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple) have accumulated competitive advantages in the fields of data and technology and earned more than three times the revenue of Wintel (Microsoft and Intel) on an annual basis. In turn, they are changing the forms and modes of traditional industries through data and technology, including retail, media distribution, automotive, and so on.

These new pioneers share something in common: they have implemented a data-driven business model and a sophisticated data asset management system. Furthermore, they are able to drive contextual applications by using data, as well as explore and convert commercial value in an efficient manner. Such enterprises that have built a data-driven culture are called smart enterprises. Characteristics of smart enterprises include the following:

• Their flexible technical platforms and data science capacity can sufficiently support huge data scale, large data dimensions, complicated data types, and flexible data formats. These platforms also enable quick insights from data, which increases the efficiency of various data application contexts.

• Their unified data management strategy can be used to manage data views that are consistent across enterprises, efficiently gather data (including self-owned and third-party data), and also efficiently output data and data services.

• Their end-to-end data engineering capacity can support data management for the business and help form a closed loop that continuously optimizes business operations.

Smart enterprises are the companies that are armed with these three capabilities.

In order to become data-driven, smart enterprises need a new platform to support them, a platform that promotes an environment that is focused on data. This platform is called SmartDP (smart data platform). SmartDP refers to a platform that explores the commercial value of data based on smart data applications, and enables proper data management, data engineering, and data science.

Comprised of a set of modern data solutions, SmartDP helps enterprises build an end-to-end closed data loop, from data acquisition to decision to action, in order to provide the capacity for flexible data insight and data value mining as well as flexible and scalable support for contextual data applications. As we’ll see later in this report, adopting SmartDP can improve enterprises’ data management, data engineering, and data science capabilities. We’ll now review each of these aspects in general terms.