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In the article, Being a digital leader is not a role, it's a competency, Ade McCormack outlines nine steps to revamp your business to compete in the digital economy. It's not surprising that five of nine the steps involve IT.

The role of IT in digital transformation is to increase its span of influence beyond technology management to strategic partner. IT needs to provide access to information and collaboration among people, systems and processes.

For the purposes of this post, I'll focus onaccessto information. IT is increasingly faced with the challenges of managing complex data. There are more systems, sources and structures of data being introduced than ever before. Most IT organizations rely on central data warehouses, and use extract, transform and load (ETL) techniques to integrate data originating in multiple systems. Then Cloud came into the information architecture to further increase the complexity. All the while business analysts are clamoring for different cuts of data to make timely discoveries and decisions.

Now is the time for IT to shine

With the adoption of data virtualization, IT can become more agile in delivering required data to business users. Many companies have figured out the value of data virtualization. They rely on data virtualization as a single integration platform to query and access data across their network. This includes accessing data that resides in the cloud and on premise across various sources and systems.

Our data virtualization platform lets you query all types of data across the network as if it were in a single place. By providing business analysts with access to all the data, leaders can make better decisions, adapt to change more quickly, and reduce costs. And IT can enable this "universal access" environment without physically moving the data.

This streamlined approach to data integration helps IT deliver:

• More insight from your data
• Faster responses to ever changing analytics and BI needs
• A flexible data management approach
• Significant savings; 50-75% over data replication and consolidation.

It's an exciting time to be in IT. Make the move from cost containment to top line revenue growth by delivering an agile data virtualization platform that can help to position you ahead of the competition.

See what customers are saying about Cisco Data Virtualization in the Forrester Total Economic Impact (TEI) Study. The report from Forrester evaluates the financial impact of investing in Cisco Data Virtualization and the potential return on investment (ROI) for the solution. In the report one Cisco Data Virtualization implementation had ROI of 346% in 8-9 Months. Seems like a viable alternative to ETL.

See customer stories and read the Forrester TEI study.

 

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Learn More from My Colleagues

Check out the blogs of Mala Anand, Mike Flannagan, Kevin Ott and Bob Eve to learn more.