Why you should be embracing new technology now

“What new technology does is create new opportunities to do a job that customers want done.”

—Tim O’Reilly

When we talk about what it means to “embrace” something, it’s important to be clear about exactly what it is we’re embracing. Rage Against the Machine’s Zack de La Rocha raging on about embracing the overthrow of the global banking industry in New Millennium Homes is much different than The Police’s Sting crooning about a warm embrace in Every Breath You Take. In this blog, I focus more on embracing an idea (being a leader in technology adoption) and leaving the warm embrace of someone special to another day (or night).

When embracing new technology, we want to avoid adopting technology for technology’s sake. Every new technology needs to support a business objective – not a technology “output.” Tech output can be described as new functionality delivered, defects resolved, and so on. Most companies focus on the technological outputs because they’re relatively easy to measure and report on. However, measurements should focus more on outcomes than on outputs: customer churn, net promoter scores, application availability, time to production, and more. How, or what, to measure could be a post all its own.

There are compelling reasons for companies to be leaders in adopting technology. Technology adoption and appropriate usage increase the performance gap between leaders and laggards. Let’s use AI as an example of embracing technology. McKinsey’s Notes from the AI frontier: Modeling the impact of AI on the world economy states that leaders in AI adoption could experience a doubling of cash flow by 2030, whereas laggards should expect a 20% decline. In addition, one of my earlier posts discussed change. That post referenced McKinsey’s Navigating a world of disruption, which reports that in their study of nearly 6,000 of the world’s largest companies, they found that the top 10% captured 80% of the economic profit. Just as telling is that the finding that the bottom 10% destroyed more economic value than the top 10% created.

Given that information, you shouldn’t be asking yourself if you will be using the new NetApp^® AFF A900 array in your data center, but when. NetApp AFF A-series arrays have been providing transformational response times for years. The AFF A900 takes this performance metric to a new level. This is the kind of consistent performance boost for your Oracle, SAP, and SQL Server databases and applications that your customers and employees will notice. That will keep everyone happy. Performance that looks like this:

Now that’s fast. <100-150𝜇s read latency out to 2M IOPS for 100% reads – smokin’. This is the kind of performance that helps to boost both employee and customer retention, that easily handles seasonal peak transactions, and that offers a smooth, predictable quarter close.

If you see the value in being a technology adoption leader and would like to understand how NetApp can help to ensure successful project outcomes, you can always speak with NetApp’s SAP and Oracle specialists. You can also learn all about the new AFF A900 here. If you like to watch videos, check out these collections from NetApp INSIGHT^®: Oracle, SAP.