Analysing the beautiful game for business

Tom Buiocchi says Roy Hodgson's appointment as England manager should strike a chord with SMBs

When the FA announced on 1 May that Roy Hodgson was its choice for the new manager of the England football team, elements of the press expressed surprise.

Some thought the more charismatic Harry Redknapp should have been chosen. But if you look at the appointment in the context of trends in the business world, the decision is rather less startling.

Hodgson is known as a thinker, a logical planner who works with all the information at hand to get the best out of his team. And his appointment comes at a time when the business world is starting to come alive to the notion of big data.

The opportunities and benefits are obvious: mining the data an organisation already holds for better customer insight can only reap positive results. Yet – unlike the FA – SMBs seem reluctant to grasp this opportunity.

If this is the era of the analyst, in football or in business, what is holding those businesses back?

Some SMBs still fail to recognise what an asset their own data is to the company. They then leave themselves open to the threats of loss or data corruption.

However, the majority of businesses feel they lack the IT expertise and resources to manage a sophisticated solution. It is not a lack of desire to capitalise on their data, but a lack of understanding about the solutions available that holds them back.

So resellers need to start thinking about products from the perspective of their customers and examine why SMBs want to make use of their data – and exactly what is stopping them from investing. Whatever the perception in the market, there isn't a need for extensive IT expertise or budgets to provide SMBs with enterprise-class hardware.

The key requirements – in football as in business – are likely to be represented by a solution that reaps dividends within minutes; that can maximse usage without intervention; that is dynamic, adaptable and affordable.

In business, a fully automated IT system which can maximise usage without intervention may combine the performance acceleration of SSD with the capacity of HDD and data-aware tiering.

SMBs need to be agile; they need a system which is data aware and will dynamically adapt to changes in workloads to optimise performance without the costly or complex route of reconfiguring the IT hardware.

They will also look at the cost of the hardware and maintenance and calculate whether they can make the most of their investment. An offering which allows them to take advantage of their data from day one without specialist intervention will deliver the biggest ROI.

There are about 72 million SMBs worldwide. That is a significant market and it is worth taking the time to understand what they need to make the most of their data and invest in IT hardware accordingly.

So the era of the analyst is here and resellers have the opportunity to bring big data to SMBs looking for new ways to obtain a competitive advantage and solve challenges they will face in the future.

Speaking of future challenges, has anyone put in a call to Roy Hodgson to find out if he has all the IT hardware he needs?

Tom Buiocchi is chief executive at Drobo