Spiky Times: How companies are responding to greater unpredictability among online customers

With the constraints of centralized technology in the rearview for leading companies, data has become the foundation
of competitiveness, with practitioners building data-driven applications and services capable of leveraging this data in new ways to better engage employees, partners and customers.

Alongside opportunity, however, decentralization has brought challenges. Among them is the emergence of a new category of data silos and a spectacular growth in unstructured data. Decentralization has therefore seen data become harder to discover, process and analyze.

At the same time, IT professionals building data-driven applications have found themselves adapting to new foundational technologies and architectures: cloud-native patterns and technologies such as microservices that have moved from the proof-of-concept stage to the heart of production.

Research commissioned by Hazelcast sought to understand how organizations are responding to these challenges. The online, invitation-only survey spoke to 629 businesses and IT decision-makers in the U.S., Europe, and Asia Pacific to find out.

• Seven in ten said they could convert more deals and special offers if armed with critical customer information at the time of engagement.
• There is a widespread conviction that combining customers’ real-time and historical data will increase such opportunities.
• Almost four-fifths struggle to unify the real-time and historical data they need to instantly engage prospects and customers and are losing potential revenue opportunities.