Why the Safe Choice Probably Isn’t In Competitive Environments

Advantage or Disadvantage, With Not Much Room In Between

Businesses constantly seek to create and maintain a competitive advantage in the form of a unique ability, method, or value proposition.

It’s easy to see this as something done in isolation, e.g., initiatives to do something faster or more efficiently than we currently do. However, advantage has no meaning in isolation. For it to exist, it must also describe a disadvantage for competitors.

Even when organizations make identical choices, their differing circumstances almost always mean the selection will work out better for some at the expense of others.  So, it seems that in competitive or adversarial environments, perceived safe choices that seek to preserve one's relative position are unlikely to be effective or risk reducing for long.  Given most business decisions aren’t easily or inexpensively reversed, it’s critical to recognize that your choices are either going to provide an advantage or create a disadvantage for some amount of time.  

In other words, if it doesn’t help you, it’s almost certainly going to hurt you.

Tradeoffs vs. Profound Innovation

When selecting technologies – a decision that is particularly slow, painful, and expensive to reverse – it’s common to find that what’s described as an innovative or disruptive solution has prioritized one set of capabilities at the expense of others to serve a neglected or emerging niche.  While this can be a very successful commercial model for the vendor, it doesn’t represent an overarching advancement that broadly applies to the diverse and dynamic needs of their customers.

This suggests a distinction between an innovation i.e., something new, and a profound innovation i.e., something new that offers overwhelming benefits while imposing few if any tradeoffs to achieve them.

The enterprise database market is a great example. It is full of innovations but short on profound ones, which is why we see a marketplace with so many products, each working for some use cases, but not for others. It’s also why data management infrastructures built to serve use cases with diverse requirements can consist of numerous, often partially overlapping solutions that have been awkwardly stitched together. This leads to complex infrastructures that are difficult and expensive to scale, operate, and maintain.

While profound innovations are rare, we’re confident that Craxel has made one and those who have taken the time to understand it agree.

Our Black Forest™ data infrastructure has been built on a new and fundamentally better mathematical model that solves a difficult problem critical to today’s data management: how to organize data for high performance and efficiency at any scale.

Faster and More Efficient Data, Everywhere and At Any Scale

The competitive advantages provided by Black Forest are simple: data and insights can be available much sooner, with incredibly fast queries that are often exponentially more efficient no matter how large your data set grows.

Rather than demonstrating the limited applicability so common to new technologies that made tradeoffs instead of breakthroughs, Black Forest supports: all data types; OLTP, OLAP, and trustless & immutable workloads; Graph, time series Graph, and SQL.

Regarding tradeoffs of our own, we’re still looking for them.  What we usually find instead is that Black Forest™ simplifies data management infrastructures, reduces cybersecurity risk, and makes ensuring governance and access control easier and more effective.

Mandatory Capabilities for Operating in Competitive Data Driven Environments

We’ve worked hard to develop a set of products that are easy to deploy and use so these capabilities can become ubiquitous within data driven organizations. We’re finding use cases in all directions.

Pretty much anywhere that gaining an insight, taking an action, or capturing an opportunity depends on faster or more efficient access to secure and accurate data at scale, businesses that leverage these capabilities will be able to change the competitive landscape.

Given the scarcity of profound innovations, and the huge resources applied to data management R&D globally, it is perfectly reasonable to be skeptical of these claims. Over time, we’ll be able to share more about some of the organizations who have done deep technical diligence on our solutions, their findings, and some of the outcomes.

In the meantime, we’ll be releasing new products over the coming weeks and invite you to test them for yourself.

If you’d like more information visit www.craxel.com or contact us at info@craxel.com to schedule a call to discuss your specific needs.

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