| | January 20158CIOReviewopinionin myRevolution over Evolution in the Technology SectorAlbert Einstein said, "If you always do what you always did, you will always get what you always got". Innovation is the crux of growth and success - the points upon which success or failure rests. Today, companies must drive innovation and adapt technology and architecture changes in order to grow and prosper. And while this does involve risk, it is necessary. In fact, the vendors that rely on their existing customers to continue to use and buy their existing, older technology or products are simply missing new market dynamics and needs. Innovation: While it may seem so elementary, such a basic fact of business, I continue to be appreciative of it when I see a good example, and judgmental when I witness it being forgotten about. There are many technology vendors that are great at innovating, but so many more that hide behind the brand that they built so long ago. These vendors seem to figure that long presence in the market can serve their future success without driving any new innovation. However, if not careful, these vendors that are resting on the laurels of their 20-plus-year-old technology will not last. Technology is constantly changing and so must your business if you intend to keep a competitive edge.An example of this technology change can be seen in traditional databases and data warehouses, data integration and infrastructure technologies - core to my company's industry. With the growth of Big Data and the Cloud over the last decade, traditional databases, data warehouses and data integration have been strained to keep up with the growth. The new technology leaders we hear about the most are the ones rising to the challenge of these new markets and re-architecting critical pieces of IT architecture from the ground up, instead of making incremental improvements to old platforms. Amazon Web Services is a great example of innovation and success. They have fundamentally altered the common, decades-old databases and data warehouses. First, to drive their own e-commerce engine, they knew that they could not gain massive scalability by bolting on extensions to the ubiquitous, aging, SQL database architecture. Instead, they threw out the rules of relationships that had governed all databases up until that point, and developed a whole new web-scale "NoSQL" database called DynamoDB. Not only was it successful for their business, but it revolutionized an industry. As author Joe Brockmeier, of Red Hat, said about it, "Amazon's Dynamo paper is the paper that launched a thousand NoSQL databases." Given the inherent limitations of relational databases, including the lack of horizontal scale, flexibility, availability, and high cost, the adoption of NoSQL databases and the market segment has grown substantially ever since. A By Shimon Alon, CEO & Chairman, Attunity
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