Monday Morning Impact – November 2
Gartner Study: Analytics Teams Must Upskill to Adapt to Automation
Marketers are investing sizable resources in analytics, but many aren’t getting the payoff they expect, according to the recent Gartner Marketing Data & Analytics 2020 survey which shows that analytics influences only 54% of marketing decisions.
The top reasons for this are poor data quality, results that are not actionable and unclear recommendations. Yet, marketing executives see huge potential for analytics. Eighty-five percent of those surveyed said that by 2022, “significantly more” of their organization’s marketing decisions will be based on marketing analytics.
To extract more value from analytics, marketing leaders must focus on building skills that address the reasons analytics are seen as underperforming — and concentrating on value-adding analytics activities outside those that are or soon will be automated, according to the report.
“It’s critical to invest more time and resources in upskilling your analytics team to have a broader influence over bottom-line results and adapt to new trends in automation,” says Lizzy Foo Kune, Senior Director Analyst at Gartner.
The report also says that marketing analytics teams currently spend too much time on low-value tasks, such as data integration and formatting, ad hoc queries and requests, and generating reports and dashboards — activities that are ripe for automation.
More than half (56%) of marketing leaders expect the size of their analytics teams to stay the same or shrink, but that likely reflects the perceived value — or lack of value — contributed by analytics teams today. Only 23% of marketing leaders cite skill development as a top priority for their marketing analytics teams, down from 39% in 2018. Marketers who say their analytics teams have not had the expected influence are more than three times as likely to be planning to reduce the size of those teams over the next two years.
The three most-cited obstacles to analytics teams’ success are manual data preparation, connecting analytics to business value and connecting analysis to insight. Automating manual and repeatable tasks will enable analytics teams to focus on more value-adding activities, such as developing actionable insights from data.
Channel Impact®
By prioritizing skill development, marketing and analytics leaders can enable analytics teams to complement, rather than be threatened by, automation.
Dell Technologies Project APEX Accelerates as-a-Service Strategy
Dell Technologies has expanded its as-a-Service capabilities with Project APEX to simplify how customers and partners access Dell technology on-demand—across storage, servers, networking, hyperconverged infrastructure, PCs and broader solutions.
Project APEX is designed to unify the company’s as-a-Service and cloud strategies, technology offerings, and go-to-market efforts, providing a consistent experience regardless of where workloads are run.
“We’re building upon our long history of offering on-demand technology with this initiative,” said Jeff Clarke, chief operating officer and vice chairman at Dell. “Our goal is to give customers the freedom to scale resources in ways that work best for them, so they can quickly respond to changes and focus less on IT and more on their business needs.”
The new Dell Technologies Cloud Console will provide the foundation for Project APEX. Businesses can browse the marketplace and order cloud services and as-a-Service solutions to quickly address their needs. Customers can deploy workloads, manage their multi-cloud resources, monitor their costs in real-time and add capabilities.
Scheduled to become available during the first half of next year, Dell Technologies Storage as-a-Service (STaaS) is designed for OPEX transactions and allows customers to easily manage their STaaS resources via the Dell Technologies Cloud Console.
Dell Technologies Storage as-a-Service will be available in the U.S. in the first half of 2021.
Channel Impact®
The intent is to simplify the means by which customers can consume IT as a Service, establishing a consistent cloud experience across the full portfolio.
Verizon Teams with Microsoft to Offer Private 5G Mobile Edge Computing
Verizon is joining forces with Microsoft to create new ways for enterprises to accelerate the delivery of 5G applications. The alliance leverages Verizon’s on-site 5G Edge network with Azure edge services in an effort to enable ultra-low latency to support functions like computer vision, augmented, mixed and virtual reality, digital twins or machine learning.
“We have built a network that provides real-world, 5G-enabled solutions today,” said Rima Qureshi, EVP and Chief Strategy Officer at Verizon. “By bringing together Verizon’s 5G network and on-site 5G Edge platform with Microsoft’s expertise in cloud services, we will enable the development of the next generation technologies everyone has been envisioning.”
“By leveraging Verizon’s 5G network integrated with Microsoft’s cloud and edge capabilities, developers and businesses can benefit from fast, secure and reliable connections to deliver seamless digital experiences from massive industrial IoT workloads to precision medicine,” said Yousef Khalidi, corporate vice president Azure for Operators at Microsoft.
Verizon claims its 5G Ultra Wideband network enables throughput at least 25 times faster than today’s 4G networks; delivers ultra-low latency; and offers very high bandwidth. The technology is expected to eventually enable 100 times larger data volumes than 4G.
Channel Impact®
Combining Verizon’s on-site 5G Edge network capabilities with Microsoft Azure can bring more computing power even closer to end customers, allowing businesses to create extremely low lag experiences.
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