The Data Management Platform Advantage: Why You Need a Unified Approach

The world of data management has been undergoing a massive transformation over the last few years. Traditional methods involving a collection of one-off, isolated solutions for handling specific tasks like ingestion, orchestration, quality control, and transformation are quickly becoming outdated.  Still required, in fact more than ever, but definitely outdated. The way of the future is a truly comprehensive data management platform model, and revenue-focused platforms are leading the way.

With the consolidation of solutions and technology, the traditional disjointed data management platform is becoming obsolete. The future lies in centralized data management platform models, offering an integrated and scalable solution that empowers mid-market and enterprise businesses alike to extract maximum value from their data, ultimately driving growth and revenue generation. It is the elastic data platform that has truly transformative power for growth in 2024 and beyond. 

Pitfalls of a One-Off Data Management Platform

While a one-off data management platform might have seemed sufficient in the past, these tools present critical challenges in today’s data-saturated landscape. Here’s why:

• Data Silos: Isolated, single-purpose tools create data silos, where valuable information remains trapped within specific systems, hindering cross-functional insights.
• Redundancy and Inefficiency: Companies often end up purchasing multiple tools with overlapping functions, leading to inefficiencies, confusion, and increased costs.
• Scalability Challenges: As your business grows and your data expands, a one-off data management platform will struggle to keep up, resulting in performance bottlenecks and costly infrastructure upgrades.
• Inconsistent Data Quality: Without a centralized data management platform, ensuring consistent data quality across systems and processes becomes significantly more difficult.

Definition of an Elastic Data Management Platform

An elastic data management platform, on the other hand, is a cloud-based solution that provides a unified and integrated approach to managing the entire data lifecycle. It’s designed with these key characteristics:

• Centralization: Combines the critical functions of data ingestion, orchestration, transformation, and data quality into a single platform, allowing for a cohesive approach to data management.
• Scalability: Can effortlessly grow or shrink its resources (like computing power and storage) based on your organization’s data processing needs. This flexibility is crucial for handling unpredictable volumes and types of data.
• Automation: Automates many of the manual and repetitive tasks involved in data management, increasing efficiency and minimizing the chance of human error.
• Revenue Focus: Prioritizes aligning data management efforts with business growth and revenue-generating activities.

The Case for a True Platform Model

A comprehensive platform model is vastly superior for addressing the complexities of modern data management. In today’s data-driven world, organizations are inundated with vast amounts of data generated from various sources, both internal and external. To derive meaningful insights and make informed decisions, it is crucial to manage and utilize this data efficiently. Deploying an elastic data platform is a revolutionary approach that addresses the challenges associated with data management and empowers organizations to unlock the true potential of their data.

Here’s why it’s the cornerstone for innovation:

• Integration and Centralization: A unified data management platform seamlessly integrates your data management functions, breaking down silos and providing a single viewpoint for all your data.
• Efficiency and Cost Savings: The platform model eliminates redundant tools, streamlines workflows, and reduces the overall cost of data management.
• Scalability: Data platform models are designed with scalability in mind, easily adapting to meet your changing data needs as your business grows.
• Enhanced Data Quality: A centralized data management platform establishes standardization for data quality processes, minimizing errors and ensuring data consistency across the board.
• AI Enablement: Platform models are a critical foundation for successfully incorporating AI tools into your data processes, leading to deeper insights and predictions.

The Four Principles of the Data Platform

In her influential 2020 book, Zhamak Dehghani outlines the core Data Management Platform Principles, also known as Data Mesh Principles. These principles consist of four key elements:

1. Domain-Oriented Ownership: Assigning ownership of data domains to specific teams within an organization. This decentralization of data ownership fosters responsibility and accountability, ensuring that data producers and consumers are closely aligned with domain experts (i.e., the revenue side of the house having ownership over the customer data domain).
2. Self-serve Data Infrastructure: Self-serve data infrastructure that enables teams to manage their data domains independently. By offering a unified platform that abstracts the complexities of underlying technologies, revenue teams are empowered to ingest, transform, and serve data without depending on central IT teams.
3. Data as a Product: Treats data as a product, emphasizing the need for data quality, documentation, and accessibility. Data quality checks, data profiling, and metadata housing/management are integral components of this approach, ensuring that data is trustworthy, discoverable, and usable.
4. Federated Computational Governance: Implements a federated computational governance model that enables cross-functional collaboration while maintaining data privacy and security. This approach allows data consumers to access and analyze data across domains while adhering to governance policies and regulations.

The Vertify Difference: A Data Management Platform With Revenue in Mind

Vertify stands out as an innovative data management platform purpose-built with revenue goals in mind.  It offers a unique, unified approach to data management and focuses on unlocking your data’s potential to drive real business growth and revenue generation.

Vertify distinguishes itself as a true data platform through the following features:

1. Decentralized Data Ownership: Vertify assigns ownership of data domains to specific teams (RevOps, Marketing Ops, Sales Ops, eComm, etc.), allowing each team to have control over their data. This decentralization allows businesses to identify and maintain the source of truth for every single data point they have in their data set.
2. Self-serve Data Infrastructure: Vertify provides a unified, self-serve data platform that abstracts the complexities of data infrastructure. This enables revenue teams to adjust their data management approach as new business processes are developed, without requiring deep technical expertise.
3.  Data Catalog and Discovery: Vertify includes a comprehensive data house and discovery system, ensuring that data is well organized and accessible. This encourages data sharing and collaboration across the organization.
4. Data Quality and Governance: Vertify incorporates data quality checks and governance policies to maintain data integrity and security. Data consumers can trust the data they access, leading to more confident decision-making.
5. Scalability and Elasticity: Vertify’s architecture is designed for scalability and elasticity, allowing organizations to handle growing data volumes and workloads efficiently. It can seamlessly adapt to changing business needs.
6. Integration with Existing Systems: Vertify is compatible with existing revenue data infrastructure, making it easier for organizations to transition to a data fabric model without significant disruption.

Modernizing Your Reporting Structure

A centralized, platform-based data infrastructure also empowers you to revolutionize your reporting structure. It enables easy data visualization, real-time dashboards, and comprehensive cross-system reporting, allowing you to track important metrics and make data-driven decisions with unprecedented speed and accuracy.

This shift empowers you to move beyond basic reporting. With a data management platform, you can delve deeper, uncovering hidden patterns and correlations within your data. This allows you to ask more complex questions, predict future outcomes with greater accuracy, and, ultimately, make data-driven decisions that directly impact your bottom line. So, ditch the static reports and embrace the dynamic world of data-driven insights brought about by a modern platform approach.

The Future is in the Data Management Platform

As data becomes ever more complex and integral to business success, the need for a true platform model in data management is indisputable. By shifting to a platform approach with solutions like Vertify and modernizing your reporting structure, you’re ensuring your organization not only survives in the cutthroat business world but thrives in the age of data and AI.

The time to invest in data management is now. If you are considering additional revenue technology in your 2024 budget, include a unified and intelligent data management platform at the top of the list. This will enable you to win with the apps you already have and the ones you adopt in the future. Want to see Vertify’s unified data management platform in action? Get started today!