Data is Not the New Oil. Data is Water!

If you work in data analytics or a related field, you’ve probably heard the mantra that data is the new oil. While the importance of oil cannot be underrated, in recent times, we have seen innovation for creating substitutes and alternates for oil, and their acceptance too. Within the next few years, many industries may completely eliminate the use of oil as fuel.

For the sustenance of human life, water is still the most important matter. Water is used for agriculture, drinking, cooking, cleaning, construction, manufacturing and many other purposes. Humans are yet to find an alternate to water. Water is absolutely necessary for all lifeforms to survive and grow. In a similar way, for the sustenance and growth of businesses, data is absolutely critical and has no alternate.

Consider a dam. Its purpose is to block a river, collect and store water so as to create a lake and distribute the water through various channels to different kinds of consumers. There can be other sources of water in a dam such as rainfall, rivulets and streams from nearby slopes. The water collected is discharged via gates to canals, aqueducts, pipes to agricultural farms, and to large concrete tanks, where it is filtered and supplied to homes, offices, hotels, restaurants, factories and other places.

If this water is never stored - and the infrastructure to supply clean, unpolluted water is not built – it will get wasted, which has dire, life-altering implications.

Does this not sound familiar to something in the data management space – with how data is stored and consumed?

Much like a dam, an integrated data warehouse stores data collected from various sources, and the ecosystem around it allows data to be filtered, processed and made ready for consumption by various types of users and applications. The uses of trusted data can be varied – for descriptive, predictive, and prescriptive analytics – and the same data is used for all these functions much like the same “water” from a dam is used for various purposes.

Teradata Vantage is the only platform for Pervasive Data Intelligence, which stores and gives access to all needed data and allows all kinds of analytics for multiple kinds of users using multiple languages, different analytic engines and workbenches of choice. Without such a platform, data will never be stored in an integrated way, will never be presented in a consumable form and will never be available for a multitude of users and applications. Like a dam which provides a robust perennial infrastructure no matter how many new water sources are added, new uses are identified, and with a growing consumer population, Vantage is a highly performant, scalable platform for analysis of data from any source, for any user, for any application and any language. Without Vantage, it is like having a lot of water, but no way of using it.

For the survival and growth of businesses, data is extremely critical. Oil is important, but data IS water!