Data Modernization on Azure SQL DW more compelling with Cognizant Adaptive Data Foundation.

Cognizant has been advising customers on how to compete with digital natives, make data based intelligent decisions at the right time by starting an introspection & assessing Data IQ leveraged to make those critical business decisions. Our thinking is through the Adaptive Data Foundation reference model which just got more exciting with the recent announcements of GigaOm benchmarks. Microsoft Azure SQL Data Warehouse (ADW) now breaks new ground in price-performance. Cognizant continues to make it easier for enterprises to modernize their data management environments by infusing AI/ML into the core data engineering process. Cognizant is enabling this through Intelligent Data Works - an Azure based data foundry.

Industry research finds that most organizations are embarking on strategic data modernization initiatives due to limitations of their traditional platforms to scale or support newer business needs. Organizations are also striving to take advantage of modern data architecture, cloud computing and monetizing the value of their data. Major advantages are improved cost, greater access to information and improved operational efficiency. To support varied needs of corporations, we have defined a service offering that is making waves in the data modernization space. Before I go any further, let me first start by introducing Cognizant’s Adaptive Data Foundation.

Adaptive data foundation is a reference model used to put together a modern data foundation that facilitates reimagining customer intelligence and create new experiences through intelligent products that are personalized and delivered through intelligent services. The Adaptive Data Foundation reference model suggests 3 strategic objectives for data modernization; Create a responsive cloud leveraged data architecture, establish an AI driven intelligent data management and realize fast insight delivery at scale. Each of these objectives are elaborated through well-defined attributes that help our customers determine if their current data and analytics ecosystem passes the smell test for delivering digital transformation. Adaptive Data Foundation comes with a data foundry (Intelligent Data Works), which has pre-engineered platform components, tools & accelerators that speed up time to market.

We have been implementing Adaptive Data Foundation based Azure platforms in multiple customer engagements in the Retail, Healthcare, Life Sciences, Insurance and other domains. For a global convenience store, we have started this journey on Azure about two years ago. A few initial problems we started with were, lack of unified view of planning and merchandised data, missing or incorrect store key metrics, environment instability due to legacy infrastructure, high cost of platform ownership, and performance issues while analyzing 12 months’ item data at different grains. In matter of 18 months, we have overcome all challenges and delivered business benefit leveraging key principles of Adaptive Data Foundation.

The Azure based data lake is a single enterprise view supporting quick decisions, with a robust data design capable of data slicing for planning and merchandising at any level. Business users can now create impactful, insightful, and actionable analysis that are driven by Power BI dashboards. Enterprise platform continues to grow and has flexibility to add more data sources and data points to allow it to meet constantly changing business needs. The convenience store which started off with a project to track open stores at any given point in time, now has the ability to get real time inventory and influence supply chain positively. Through enhanced customer intelligence, they are able to deliver personalized digital offers real time at the convenience store helping revenue growth.

The current architecture already on SQL DW Gen2 has improved data ingestion process and analytical workload query performance by 5X times. This also resulted in reducing the DWU unit from 6000 to 3000 without impacting the SQL Data Warehouse performance. Based on several customer experiences similar to this, we believe that SQL DW Gen2 is at the top with respect to price-performance (P-P).

The additional new improvement in P-P announced, is not only compelling for our existing customers to now upgrade to ADW but is an even more compelling reason for customers to modernize their Data Management environment to ADW through Cognizant’s Adaptive Data foundation.

The question is - are you ready to be truly digital?