It's not enough to simply bring together scattered data from multiple sources into one place. For it to be usable in web and mobile apps, for data analysis, or other purposes, it has to be fully structured, with a topical API in front of it.
..and yet, that is where traditional data warehouses and data lakes stop: at getting the data into one place. Attempts to take it from there to the finish line often produce limited results after first going through a long, costly free-for-all.
Data Lakes & Warehouses:
$42 Billion Annually, 85% Failure Rate
During 2022, in an attempt to corral scattered data and make use of it, businesses spent at least $42 billion: $13 billon on data lakes, plus $29 billion on data warehouses.
And that spending increases every year.
Annual spending on data lakes is expected to reach $80 billion by 2032, and on data warehouses, $52 billion by 2028., for a total of at least $120 billion annual spend in ten years.
So why is it that 87% of data science projects never make it into production according to Venture Beat, and a Gartner analyst estimated in 2017 that 85% of big data projects fail?
Gartner went a step further and predicted that through 2018 90% of deployed data lakes would be "useless"!
It's so bad that they're now often called "data swamps". What is going on?
Making the Data Usable
We believe that the cause of the exorbitant spending, and high rates of failure of these projects is that it is not enough to simply bring the data together in one place.
In order to extract the full value of the data you need to do work to make it consumable by the target consumers of that data, such as web or mobile apps, or authorized third parties, such as partners, affiliates, or customers.
To do so you need to first organize the data into a comprehensive data model. This is what we call creating a unified view of the data. No small feat.
Then you need to map the data from each of your sources to the unified view, load it, and keep it in sync. Also tricky.
Then you need to create a comprehensive API that fits that unified view, and accomodates the intended consumers of the data. Also not a small feat.
Let's call this process making the data usable. It can be very expensive, time consuming, and error prone, and none of it is provided by traditonal data warehouse and data lake technologies.
This is where theHub™ comes in.
An Operational Hub
theHub™ does much of the work for you, and provides a path to the future: a central system for your apps and data.
It's an operational system, running securely in the cloud that enables you to simplify and centralize your data through its comprehensive business data model, unified view, unique hub and spoke architecture, and comprehensive business API, theHub API™.
You likely won't need a data warehouse or data lake at all. Simply load your data from your source(s) by using one of our prebuilt connectors, or create your own connector that loads the data through theHub API™.
Learn more about theHub™.