CREATING A DATA ADVANTAGE IN FINANCIAL SERVICES

At Pure and together with Viadex, we’re focused on a central theme: exponentially expanding the value of data. We aim to deliver a data platform that enables our customers to build a new class of applications and to extract new insights from data – we call this data advantage. To do this, we’re going to need to expand our reach to new types of information, to deepen our integrations with next generation applications and platforms, and to tailor our solutions to the developers of tomorrow’s clouds and applications.

But what does that “data advantage” provide to our customers? Well, if you are operating as a financial services firm, the advantage for you may be completing a process faster, validating a decision faster, or simply getting a report to market faster.

Independent of whether your infrastructure is public cloud, private cloud, SaaS, or most likely some hybrid of all three – data is the key. Data is the strategic core that enables competitiveness and differentiation in tomorrow’s economy; data is where the potential lies. Yet we are just at the beginning of leveraging machine learning and advanced analytics to take data insights beyond even human prediction. Differentiation lies in having the most data, analyzing it the fastest, discovering new insights, and ultimately delivering new products and experiences not possible without it.

Yet despite the above, it is unfortunate that due to IT decisions, data can also be the key bottleneck. Data (on disk) is the last mechanical gate in the compute chain. Data is where compromises are ultimately made: how much to store, how much can be analyzed, how quickly copies of that data can be created, and how long to wait for answers – these are compromises no one wants to (or should have to) make.

Making IT heroes – from bottleneck to the strategic differentiator

One of the greatest experiences of my nearly 3 years at Pure Storage has been watching customers be successful when working with us, and recognising that data is the most important aspect of their business.

Take for example one of our many valued customers, which does credit processing for their customers.

Their first introduction to Pure was on a simple project they had around moving to Virtual Desktop Infrastructure(VDI), which is a common theme in financial services. There main issue was that their VDI environment was slow. Boot storms were disrupting the key work for a number of their users including their executives and it was affecting productivity. Deploying all flash platform which was up and in production quickly and which was “always” on to support their operation was key and while that was a small project for them, it demonstrated the massive impact a simple to use, always on data platform like Pure was able to help.

The use of Pure storage as a relatively new vendor to solve a very visible issue in their VDI gave them confidence to extend the use of Pure to another key area of their business, Credit Analysis and forecasting. While VDI and resolution of the issues described above were challenging, the most important use and impact to the company’s bottom line and business was using their SAS analytics workload. The work done on the data warehouse is essential, because this information is required to quickly score a customer’s credit, and this allows them to make a decision on credit terms.

The issue for this client was that the analytics team had no more time to ask questions of the data, the processing on the legacy hybrid storage array was simply taking too long. The window was completely full and meant that they had limited time to look at the data. It took them 24 hours in the day just to complete their ETL’s (extract-transform-load), their regressions, and get their new model for the day.Once the client put SAS on Pure Storage it took their workload from 24 hours to 6 hours. This freed up huge windows of time, enabling the business to ask more questions and explore more opportunities inside the data to derive more value. This allowed that customer to add these new insights into their operations.

The result of this was that the Chief Analytics officer sent a note to IT thanking them for their role in solving the problem. A very rewarding example.

For many customers, this is an example of Pure’s “transformative” impact on a customer’s business. Pure had a solution that not only addressed specific pain points around complexity of IT management, but also solved business problems. Pure’s impact can extend throughout an entire organisation.

For more information about how Pure and Viadex can accelerate your Analytics and VDI challenges, please don’t hesitate to contact marketing@viadex.com