Information Management

HRG is aware of a wide range of data management technologies that have evolved over the years. In combination, these technologies can aggregate, integrate and transform disparate data into useful information for the development of strategies, services, and products. These technologies can turn data into useful information in a matter of minutes as opposed to days or weeks, based on older technologies. HRG believes that these new and improved data management technologies have evolved to become mission critical tools in the struggle for competitive differentiation and market dominance. Today perception is reality as witnessed by the ever increasing reach and influence of the internet and associated interactive web applications. Data management technologies play a pivotal part by providing in a timely fashion the information that is projected to potential clients and competitors’ clients. For these and many other reasons related to the competitive market, it is critical that organizations, regardless of size, rapidly gain the experience and expertise to effectively analyze and acquire the right tools to process data, generate required business information, and take action based on that information. Availability, performance, throughput, capacity, and security are among some of the key attributes that any viable strategy for data management must vigorously embrace. HRG has the hands on experience and expertise to help you formulate the most advantageous data management strategies for your business needs.

The key asset within an enterprise is its data. Data is the central focus of all enterprise processing. Without it, the enterprise dies. Therefore, the initial data technologies not only gathered data but more importantly protected the data. Thus, backup and recovery technologies evolved and continue to evolve as the amount of data increases. All databases had to manage the data according to the ACID properties (atomicity, consistency, isolation, and durability) which guaranteed integrity of transactional computations even across distributed systems. Databases continued to evolve from indexed and hierarchical files to relational (RDBM), which provided a powerful way to access, combine, join, and select data from a database.

As more and more diverse data was obtained by enterprises, the concept of data warehousing arose, where all data was centralized into a central repository that could be analyzed or mined. From data warehouses, data marts evolved that consisted of subsets of data oriented to a specific purpose. It was rare when a large enterprise had all its data in the same format or database, so to generate the data warehouses and data marts, the data that came from disparate databases or files needed to be converted accordingly and integrated, thus came the technologies of data integration - extract, transform, and load (ETL). To provide more performance and scalability, clustered databases were introduced, where the database was basically partitioned on different nodes, and the nodes only operated on the data located at the node, providing better performance and scalability.

Lately, a lot of attention is being placed in the area of Business Intelligence (BI), which is how an enterprise uses data to better understand the market behavior. Based on the data gathered, BI can provide historical, current, and predictive views of business operations. The information used in BI may or may not need to be up to date, but as competition increases, the data needs to be as current as possible and analyzed as soon as possible, in some cases on a daily or hourly basis. The initial RDMSs were notoriously slow at complex functions against the data but have improved over the years by using techniques like in memory databases and parallel processing. The original RDBMs are known as row based relational databases and were used to access a row or record at a time. New technologies in relational databases allow for improved performance by accessing a column at a time instead of a row at time. These types of databases are known as column based relational databases. These are making huge inroads for applications like BI that just need to read and process large amounts of similar data.

HRG has a history of success in delivering results, offering unparalleled advice and assistance in developing long-range strategies, as well as hands-on implementation of short-term tactical solutions.  HRG’s team of experts has been in the industry for over 30 years across multiple companies, either developing or using data management products and services. HRG offers services designed to meet the needs for extending your current data management practices and integrating them with new technologies.