read the full IDC report on Virtual Data here.
Here are some key sound bites from the report:
“Data has turned IT departments into business enablers. Data acts as a tax on IT operations when IT departments cannot do what businesses need them to do because they are too busy ‘keeping the lights on.’ ”
“When we bought Delphix, the original reason was all of the terabytes we were avoiding. But now, the main benefit for us is the agility that it gives us — the increase in productivity. We didn’t realize when we bought it that the agility would be so great.”
Companies using virtual data “have increased the number of copies per database they maintain from 6 to 17.”
“Within a year, we were running three times the number of testing environments, but without expanding our storage needs.”
” ‘We would have had to provision another five to six physical environments at about a million dollars cost’ to approach the functionality unleashed by Delphix.”
“Companies say that their application development teams are much more productive with Delphix. This productivity stems from their spending far less unproductive time waiting for fresh databases and having to resolve fewer data-related issues.”
“Now, these developers are probably saving about two weeks of time in terms of getting their databases per testing cycle.”
“Staff reallocated due to time savings with Delphix gets to focus on other things that need work, such as automation and innovation.”
“These companies are reducing downtime instances by putting more recently refreshed and higher- quality data into their development and testing databases as a result of using Delphix.”
Report says that “because they can do database refreshes much faster, companies need less time to fix data-related problems. One company noted that it runs 40 regression tests per database during development efforts with Delphix instead of only 5 or 6 without taking any additional time. ”
“The companies interviewed for this study also report that they are achieving significant business productivity gains by using Delphix’s data virtualization software, including higher revenue.”
“Delphix is helping eliminate data’s drag on business operations for these companies and driving business value for them by:
Reducing the time needed to push applications through to end users and customers
Allowing companies to undertake more data-driven projects
Enabling productivity gains for employees across these organizations
”
“With Delphix, database refresh time has gone from an average of four days to minutes, making the companies’ use of data more agile and productive.”
“Faster refreshes mean that more testing is occurring, data quality is higher and more accurate, and employees of all types are spending less unproductive time waiting for data to be provided.”
“As one customer explained, ‘We’ve gone from three days to provision an environment where the data was two days stale when it arrived to minutes. That’s a complete paradigm shift.’ ”
“The companies reported that they have reduced the average time it takes them to deploy a customer-facing application from more than two months to less than one month because they are getting the needed data much faster with Delphix.”
“Delphix is also helping these companies complete internal upgrades 34% faster, meaning that they are only taking five months on average to complete such deployments with Delphix, down from eight months before.”
“Interviewed companies report completing 29.4% more data-driven projects per year with Delphix and a strong 8.5% employee productivity gain on projects impacted by Delphix.”
“According to one company, Delphix has helped a team of 100 employees achieve up to a 25% productivity gain by making possible the automation of more than 1,000 reports.”
“His company estimated that Delphix was helping it realize at least an additional million dollars in revenue per year by speeding up projects through improved data provisioning.”
“The chief cause of slow database application development, inefficient database testing, and resultant application failures and interruptions in business is not storage per se but the complex tasks associated with making and refreshing test and development copies of databases, including resource deployment, staff time, and recurring tasks for testing. These things don’t change regardless of how cheap the storage becomes or how easy it is to use.”
“A substantial roadblock to the agility of the enterprise is its inability to evolve database applications fast enough to meet the changing requirements of a rapidly evolving business climate.”
“The dramatic simplification of database administration tasks saved the time usually spent in defining development and test databases and getting them up and running so that database administrators could concentrate on the more high-value tasks of supporting the applications teams in adjusting and perfecting both the database and its application.”
“There’s a simple fact preventing most enterprises from transitioning to rapid development iterations. It just takes too much time to test critical systems against a snapshot of production data.”
Report says “93% of top-perfoming companies view the need to increase the frequency of software development deployments as a top reason to invest in a virtual database. “
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