Featured in the August edition of Qantas magazine, find out in this interview with Glenn McPherson, managing director of NetApp Australia & New Zealand, why it's important to unlock the value of your data through a Data Fabric approach.

1. Unlock
your data
There’s an endless
stream of data cycling
through the world.
What customers buy,
what they like, what
they don’t – all of that
information can be instantly
available to a business. But data has no value
on its own. It needs to be cross-referenced
with other datasets and interpreted quickly
so your business can put the insights to use.
And if your data-management strategy
doesn’t allow you to do that, there’s a
problem. Glenn McPherson, managing
director of NetApp Australia and New
Zealand, reveals why having a vision
for your business data is crucial.
How has the way we
think about data changed?
Data has always been used by
businesses to create new business or
a new product or improvement. What’s
changing is accessibility. You can assess
large volumes of data at once and
therefore businesses have the ability
to analyse it at great depths really
quickly. It’s a very disruptive or exciting
time, depending on your point of view.
What does the ability to
access and analyse data mean
for businesses, day to day?
In the past, when information flow
was a lot slower, you had more time to
respond. It took a while for competitors
to come in and offer something better
than what incumbent suppliers were
offering. Now, you have to continually
disrupt your own business to be relevant
in the marketplace. We can access
information so readily and make decisions
so quickly in a way that we couldn’t
a year ago, much less 20 years ago.

2. BROUGHT TO YOU BY NETAPP
What are some ways businesses have
used data analysis to their advantage?
Hotel and resort marketer and operator
Mantra Group is applying a data-centric
approach to managing hotel room
utilisation. Mantra is able to use the speed
and performance of its platform to ensure
that room utilisation is optimised without
oversubscribing. Data mobility also
means that if customers are looking for
rooms on sites such as Wotif or Expedia,
it can help provide real-time room
availability and pricing based on how
many people are looking.
Online bank ING DIRECT has been
using data-management techniques for
real-time monitoring to spot trends and
react to market changes. Rather than
having a generic set of products it hopes
will work, the bank uses a data-driven
approach to develop new products that
respond to consumer demand. ING can
get these solutions to market fast and
assess their effectiveness quickly.
Are there insights that companies have
gained from breaking down data silos?
It’s so far-ranging, from improving
a product line to completely disrupting
industries – Airbnb, for example, is now
the largest “hotel” in the world and it
doesn’t have any capital. CoreLogic RP
Data, which provides property information
across Australia and New Zealand, has
turned data into valuable insights for
its customers. Every day, it takes in over
130 feeds of property data and imagery
to create more than 500 million property
decision points. These help real estate
agents, home owners, investors and
government organisations make informed
property and financial decisions.
Many businesses now have the ability
to bring datasets together, where and
when they need them to create better
business value. For example, Telstra
has recently launched an offering called
Telstra Virtual Storage, which is based
on NetApp’s data fabric approach.
It provides customers with the agility to
securely manage data across both private
Visit netapp.com/datavisionary-au
(on a customer’s premises) and public
cloud properties, as they require or
desire, on a flexible consumption model.
Are businesses that aren’t leveraging
their data being left behind?
If you’re not leveraging data, that’s not
to say you won’t be successful – but you’ll
possibly be trumped by others using
these capabilities and you might not see
it coming. We’re giving customers the
ability to be custodians of their data so
no matter where their data is, whether
it’s in the cloud or an on-premise data
centre or with a specialist service
provider, they have access and control.
What key trends do you see
on the horizon?
Businesses are becoming much more
application-focused and it’s important
we have software-enabled solutions that
allow our customers to accelerate their
business outcomes. NetApp recently
introduced a next-generation set of
data-centre tools called hyper-converged
infrastructure. It intelligently scales up
and down and guarantees performance
and capacity for each application that
is running. For example, a demanding
stock-trading application that requires
very fast response times does not impact
the responsiveness of the sales reporting
platform that a business needs to run
continuously. We’re also offering it to
customers on a consumption model
where they only pay for what they use.
Everything we’re doing now is with
data fabric in mind. Think of it as an
imaginary thread of data going through
all of your core IT assets. We really want
to help customers change their world
with data and therefore we need to give
them control. So every technology
we innovate must have that capability.