Data has always been valuable for a variety of business purposes, but as 5G continues to expand worldwide, mobile service providers and other companies are realizing they need to rethink how they use and present new troves of information.

ABI Research’s 5G Cloud Data Management report points to the manufacturing industry as easy evidence of the value innovative data management can bring. According to their study, yearly analytics and data services revenue in the manufacturing industry is expected to reach $82 billion by 2030.

The ability to collect, sort, present and use data will be crucial now that companies will have more access to information thanks to 5G networks. The report says that right now, most data “remains dark, disparate and isolated.”

“This hybrid environment calls for a 5G data governance system that rests on a (cloud) data management infrastructure anchored on two pillars: one, a standardized data format; and two, interoperability across multiple networks (e.g.,4G and 5G),” said Don Alusha, senior analyst at ABI Research.

“Furthermore, obtaining both structured data and unstructured data from the network and IT side respectively is a key requirement for the much-coveted data centric operations the industry is seeking, Alusha said.

SEE: Special report: How 5G will transform business (free PDF) (TechRepublic Premium)

Vendors and service providers are now transitioning to a data-centric model after years of using an app-centric approach. Companies like Amazon, Cloudera, and Microsoft are leading the way by selling vast data repositories and analytics tools in addition to services that provide performance, scalability, and availability.

“In other words, they sell convenience at scale, a feat they can achieve by virtue of a harmonized and integrated technology, human capital, and the right organizational environment,” according to the study.

“For innovative use case to materialize, analytics processes must be pervasive and tap into a unified data lake, an area that, unlike web-scale players, operators have yet to fully exploit for monetization or operational efficiency. Further, a data strategy remains a key piece to the wider 5G cloud data management puzzle and one that AT&T and Telefonica are successfully leveraging,” Alusha said.

The study pointed out that more companies needed to prioritize data collection because of its value and find new ways to give the numbers meaning in a business context. The study lists a number of valuable use cases that have been successful in a variety of industries.

“Vendors that provide 5G cloud data and traffic management solutions may consider establishing an ‘analytics environment’ as a symbiotic add-on to their big data platforms,” Alusha said. “Meaning an all-encompassing blueprint that guides MSPs toward the right culture and incentive systems that create and sustain the use of analytics tools (data layer and software tools).”

In the report, researchers said they expected the expansion of 5G to force companies out of their silos and into a larger environments that allowed for more access to tons of new information.

Some companies, such as Ericsson, Nokia and Cloudera, were starting to expand their services to offer open APIs, standardized interfaces, complementary analytics frameworks that address performance management, data engineering and data warehousing use cases hosted in cloud or on premises.

“MSPs, on the other hand, must take on a process re-engineering undertaking where existing processes and associated functions are interwoven with the right data streams to successfully shift to a data-driven business and data-centric operations,” Alusha added.


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