Cloud Service Providers deliver elasticity, scalability, and managed service offerings to ingest, enrich, and monetize data assets.
Organizations own valuable data assets that could be leveraged to create new products and services, with new recurring revenue streams. If you have been thinking about embarking on this journey (or you are now), consider these fundamental questions.
Why is it important?
Only 17% of companies have established monetization initiatives for data services (BARC 2020). Yet we know that data is the fuel for critical technology initiatives like Automation, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. At the same time, the global cloud computing market is expected to reach $623.3 billion by 2023. Therefore, more and more companies are moving to or expanding both their data and cloud consumption. The Covid-19 health crisis has even served to motivated laggards, accelerating their move to the cloud. The combination of these factors provides a ripe situation for creating and monetizing data services.
What does it mean?
Every person and thing will soon be interconnected, both creating and consuming data. Organizations and people need help to drive value out of this proliferation of data, and must ingest continuous streams of data from many locations to produce continuous analytics from those streams. Companies are investing in tools and technologies to access and analyze data, mine for undiscovered patterns, and create valuable insights for decision making. This investment creates opportunities to leverage a data service as a product or create a tool to understand these data streams. Providing access to data anytime and anywhere is the main driver for cloud adoption.
Only 17% of companies have established monetization initiatives for data services (BARC 2020)
What is the benefit?
Companies own some datasets that may not provide much value independently, but when blended with other datasets become very interesting to your customers. Combining these datasets can produce exponential value and help create new revenue based on the ability of these data streams to inform consumers. Cloud Service Providers deliver elasticity, scalability, and managed service offerings to ingest, enrich, and monetize data assets. The pace of innovation picks up speed in the cloud as customers can focus on their core business domain instead of wrangling with raw data center concerns like storage, compute and network.
How does it work?
Enterprises are moving to SaaS platforms in the cloud such as Salesforce, Workday and ServiceNow, and curating valuable data within them. Cloud data warehouse platforms like Snowflake, Databricks and DeltaLake provide an opportunity to enrich your transactional data with other publicly available datasets at scale, and monetize data via API platforms. Messaging platforms like Confluent Kafka help maintain data freshness by providing real-time message processing. All three Cloud Service Providers have an API Gateway platform in play to secure, throttle and operate API's.
In summary, the drivers are in place, data is everywhere, and cloud services are available to help you implement data services monetization.
