The Glory Days (or are they?)

You’re 10 years old. Dragged home from a long, exhausting day at school, you jump off the school bus and sprint into your house, leaving a trail of school debris (Chuck Taylors, papers, backpack, lunchbox). There’s one thing on your mind – perfectly stacking different shaped blocks into perfect rows and setting a new high score in Tetris. You can’t wait for the end result – a clean, colorful, perfect Tetris stack with a perfect score – giving you bragging rights over all your friends for what feels like an eternity…

… and then reality sets in. The block shapes aren’t falling in the order you wanted them to. They speed up and drop faster and faster, eliminating the time you need to strategize and plan your next move. There’s a gap in your perfect row… and yet another gap… and another gap… and before you know it, the dream of the perfect score is gone. Your bragging rights are now gone, and while you wallow in your imperfect rows filled with gaps, you wonder whether some of your friends have surpassed you and you dread hearing their stories of Tetris triumph the next morning at school.

What went wrong? Did you dream too big? Did you execute poorly? Did you have all the necessary strategy, time, and skills to be successful? As you agonize over whether you could have done things differently, you think to yourself, “I did what everyone else was doing – why didn’t it work?” … and therein lies the problem.

You’re now years past 10 years old. You have an exciting career in the data and analytics space and have been given the opportunity of a lifetime – to build out your organization’s new ‘Modern Data Stack’ – the capability that will deliver millions in incremental revenue to the business, supercharge your analytics capabilities, and create competitive advantage that will propel your organization forward for years to come. And there is great news – the ‘Modern Data Stack’ success story seems to be well-documented with many other peers heading down this path. You’ve got it in the bag – follow the playbook and ride the wave to career acceleration like never before… right?

Don't look now - you're playing Tetris again.

What if I told you that building the ‘Modern Data Stack’ will leave you feeling like you did at 10 years old staring at the “GAME OVER” screen after yet another failed attempt to level up in Tetris? You’ll take your best swing and inevitably run into the same (4) barriers that every Architect, Chief Data Officer, Director of Analytics, and the like, run into:

1. “We don’t have the time”

2. "We don’t have the people (or expertise)”

3. “We don’t have the data”

4. “We don’t have the budget”

In the end it’s game over, and you’re left with a stack of different colored and shaped tools plagued by gaps that have gone unfilled despite your best efforts.

The Economics of the Modern Data Stack
are Unsustainable

Let’s be honest – when teams started implementing the ‘Modern Data Stack’, nobody talked about what this would look like 5-10 years down the road. The cloud was all the rage, and it was a no-brainer to continue to invest in cloud-based tools that would enable your teams to work faster, on more data, and with a higher level of capabilities. More and more cloud-native tools were hitting the market. More data providers began selling and distributing raw data feeds and universities seemed to be cranking out more data science and analytics talent than ever before to meet the demand in the workforce.

All of this sounds great – until you consider the long-term impact.

1. Tool proliferation will happen faster than ever before

2. Requests for raw data feeds will get out of control

3. Teams and talent will demand higher and higher compensation

4. Budgets will inflate faster than a balloon animal

In fact, in-order-to keep up with the demands of the ‘Modern Data Stack’, it is estimated that 15% in new, incremental analytics budget will need to be created year-over-year, doubling your analytics budget in the next 5 years (source: Fortune Business Insights). None of our customers are anticipating creating an entirely incremental, 100% increase in analytics budget in the next 5 years. For many of the companies we work with, this would require them to find tens of millions of dollars annually to offset the cost of their new ‘Modern Data Stack’… with no end in sight, and with very few economies of scale to gain (due to the fact that the ‘Modern Data Stack’ is a conglomeration of many 3rd party tools procured individually).

And let’s remember what they are getting with the ‘Modern Data Stack’ – a stack of different colored and shaped tools with massive gaps… not delivering the ROI you anticipated.

The Modern Data Stack is Ripe for Disruption
– by Cloud-Native, Turnkey Applications

So, if the ‘Modern Data Stack’ is unsustainable… how do I deliver accelerated analytics capabilities for my teams and organization?

The answer is by leveraging a new analytics model – deploying turnkey analytics applications that are built by industry experts and delivered on a single, cloud-native platform.

Let’s not forget that the ‘Modern Data Stack’ had the best intentions at the start – delivering a suite of new capabilities that were not limited by data size or compute power. We can still deliver on the dream of infinitely scalable insights, but it will take a different approach than many have taken over the last 5 years.

Your Competitive Advantage is Speed
– Don’t let the ‘Modern Data Stack’
Slow you Down

At Seek, we set out on a mission to solve the world’s biggest barriers to analytics ROI (as highlighted above):

1. Time (nobody has it)

2. People (you may have SOME of the skillsets needed, but often are in search of the ‘unicorn’ talent)

3. Data (you can buy SOME of the data we need, but not all)

4. Money (nobody has unlimited budget – and building analytics competitive advantage on your own is way more expensive than anyone thought)

We believe that organizations should shift their perspective on what ‘competitive advantage’ truly means. In most cases, the competitive advantage is NOT building a predictive model that is 1% better than your competitor (although your data science team will likely tell you differently). We find across industries, teams, and use cases, your primary competitive advantage comes through speed – your ability to generate 10 insights from data in the time it takes your competitor to generate one. If speed is the advantage, turnkey apps get your teams from 0-60 faster than anyone in the market.

Breakthrough the Barriers to Deliver Speed
Like Never Before

Turnkey applications (on Seek Insight Cloud) solve the (4) biggest barriers through:

1. Delivering insights in minutes, not months – driving exponential time savings for your teams.

2. Delivering applications built by industry experts who have the necessary experience to know exactly WHAT you’re trying to solve and HOW it needs to be solved to be actionable… so that you don’t have to go hire the ‘unicorns’.

3. Delivering curated, 3rd party data models that free you from 9-12 months of procurement hell and only deliver the data you NEED… not the data you’ll throw away.

4. Delivering the ‘Modern Data Stack’ in its original intent (a suite of new analytics capabilities not limited by data size or compute power) as-a-Service… streamlining the cost of buying, building, and connecting analytics tools… and delivering the benefits you need without the headache of the ‘build’.

Your Tetris game may have been lacking an ultimate cheat-code to eliminate the gaps in your stacks... but analytics apps are the cheat-code that will set a new high score for your team in analytics – removing the gaps in your data & analytics stack and delivering the ROI your team has always hoped to achieve.