Predictions Series 2022: AiThority Interview with Jeremiah Stone, CTO at SnapLogic

The current state of the economy may be creating a great deal of uncertainty in the business world, but one thing it won’t do is silence the march of innovation into the New Year and beyond. While there may be a reimagining of technology practices, the focus on making the way we work more efficient and effective will remain. Here, SnapLogic CTO Jeremiah Stone shares the four trends that will reshape the future of business.

Hi Jeremiah. Welcome to our Predictions Series. Please tell us about the value of real-time data.

Real-time data is in greater demand than ever before. Real-time insights are, arguably, an organization’s most valuable source of information in turbulent environments. Long-term trends and ‘last month, last quarter, or last year’ musings are irrelevant when fundamental business conditions are changing rapidly.

While working with real-time data requires a more sophisticated data and analytics infrastructure and often comes at a greater cost, there’s perhaps no greater expense than missed opportunity in today’s fast-paced landscape. Up-to-the-minute insights empower organizations to make faster, more informed decisions by understanding what is – and is not – working in the business. This helps businesses survive inflationary cycles by cutting non-functioning investments and doubling down on the profitable parts of the business.

How does real-time data influence decision-making in the organizations?

Real-time insights are critical for business agility. Agility without data is operating on instinct and hunch. Most critically, real-time data can alert a company of issues early. Unlike wine, problems do not get better with age!

As an increasing number of companies look to data to gain a competitive advantage, those with real-time data will secure a winning position. This is why real-time data analytics will be in high demand throughout 2023.

How should organizations accelerate their data strategy?

By embracing a multi-cloud strategy.

CIOs are concerned about cloud spending. And rightly so. According to KPMG’s annual technology survey, many companies that have shifted enterprise-technology tools into the cloud in recent years, in part as a cost-saving measure, say those investments have yet to pay off. Some are even seeing costs go up.

The primary reason for these blown budgets? Cloud costs are often not transparent in early deployments due to consumption-based pricing and the lack of experience with new technology models. Without experience, CIOs aren’t able to think strategically about how to distribute IT capabilities across different cloud providers to maximize cost productivity and figure out how to make different cloud services work well together.

While some cloud vendors are lowering sales forecasts for the year ahead, we believe the answer to the problem lies in embracing a multi-cloud strategy, optimizing for cost productivity on a per-provider basis.

At SnapLogic, we recently announced at Amazon Web Services (AWS) re:Invent 2022, significant business momentum resulting from enhancements to our Partner Connect Program, which helps partners accelerate their integration and automation capabilities.

In fact, SnapLogic has excelled at providing customers and partners with the highest return on investment (ROI) in the shortest amount of time, according to Forrester. Since its inception last year, partners have developed over 400 SnapLogic specializations that accelerate customer value with services and solutions.

As stated by Jason Wakeam, Vice President of Global Channels at SnapLogic: “As a cloud native integration platform, we’re constantly improving ways our partners help customers modernize their cloud, applications and data architecture.”

How can organizations prepare for 2023?

By bridging the ‘great data divide’.

Those organizations that are truly data-driven have the ability to act with certainty in the face of uncertainty. That is, when up against economic uncertainties, wars, flow of talent trends, pandemics, natural disasters and the like, those that are truly data-driven will thrive through informed decision-making. Those that are not will rely on luck rather than their wits to survive.

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While big data has largely been harnessed by large corporations and governments, real-time data is now more accessible to companies of any size. Data democratization, through more accessible analytic tools and cloud technologies, puts insights in the hands of everyone, working to create a generation of business owners that are swapping their gut instincts for data-driven operations.

2023 will see more firms of all sizes embrace the power of data analytics to grow their revenues and margins in the face of difficult economic headwinds, effectively bridging the Great Data Divide.

Tell us a little bit about the role of AI in business.

2023: The year of AI for data companies!

AI is fast moving from lofty fantasy to reality, and 2023 is only going to see the use and development of AI accelerate. Already today, AI has the ability to turn text into drawings and videos demonstrating the ability to not only analyze but create. Tesla’s autonomous driving system has also made a giant leap forward, illustrating the progress that image processing and edge computing are making.

SnapLogic’s Iris AI, for instance, uses AI to automate difficult, low-level development tasks, eliminating the data and application integration backlog that stifles most technology initiatives.

And this is just AI in its infancy. The future of AI technology is set to greatly impact the business landscape in the next year and beyond. It’s likely 2023 will bring AI-based technologies that personalize enterprise software for the individual employee experience. AI will also continue to help employees do specific jobs better and more efficiently.

AI holds great promise to deliver not only productivity but business agility. By adopting powerful AI technologies that can unify data in one platform, an organization is primed to connect the dots between its data and its people seamlessly.

Thank you, Jeremiah! That was fun and we hope to see you back on AiThority.com soon.