5 posts tagged with "Data Asset"

Someone told me recently that SaaS is dead. I disagree — strongly — but not because the argument behind it is silly. It isn't. Three things in it are true.

Building software is getting dramatically cheaper. Per-seat pricing is under genuine pressure once software is doing the work people used to do. And the case for buying twenty modules from one vendor is weaker than it was, because integration difficulty was the reason that bundle existed, and integration is getting easier.

All fair. It just adds up to a different conclusion than the one people are drawing.

You have acquired a business. It has been trading successfully for years on its own systems, with its own processes and its own way of describing what it does.

Within weeks, someone will propose moving it onto yours.

That instinct is understandable and it is usually expensive. There is another way to get what the board actually wants, and it starts by separating two problems that are almost always treated as one.

In the previous post we argued that AI-ready data starts with master data — that until an organisation has one definition of "customer", nothing built on top of it can be trusted.

That is the foundation. It is not the whole building.

Master data tells an AI system who your customers are. It cannot tell it what they did. Answers that mean anything to a business — which accounts are growing, which are quietly churning, where the cross-sell actually is — come from transactional data. And transactional data is only useful to AI if it is linked to the master data that gives it meaning.

Often I see companies define their data strategy by simply choosing the top tools from the latest quadrant. Is your approach more about technology selection, or about shaping a strategy that delivers measurable value?

At its core, an asset is something that creates value and drives growth—directly or indirectly. It should strengthen resilience, fuel innovation, and deliver competitive advantage.

Now consider your data: Is your Enterprise Data Platform positioned as an asset, or is it on track to become a liability?

As your business expands, the foundations you set for your data become critical. A true data asset reduces reliance on ever-changing applications and removes the need for specialist technical skills just to interpret the numbers.