Cloud on Top

Virtualization and cloud-computing are trends that are top of mind for us both in our internal applications as well as those we go to market with. We're working to take advantage of both to allow us to concentrate on our specific capabilities as a company and to reduce spend on commodity capabilities like administration and backups.

We are also investing in NoSQL and big data technologies such as Hadoop. These technologieswill provide us with the predictive and business intelligence capabilities that are needed to be a fast and agile business.

Effective Data Management

The largest challenge for us is managing the growth of database in our datacenters. We are seeing more than 30 percent growth in storage required for these on premise databases. With big data and analytics, we expect even more growth year-over-year. We are diligently working to identify tools and processes to archive and compress data and to better manage test databases.

As we continue todrive towards an agile and a self-provisioning model, we have to be more cost-conscious with regards to allocating tiered storage and managing our automated test environments. This will be achieved by utilizing new technologies such as Docker, Chef and Service Now, in conjunction with VMWare for self-provisioning

Workforce in Tune with Technology

A global company like NCR cannot depend upon a workforce that is located at a single geographic location. We have worked diligently to define and redefine the global workforce demands by hiring the best and brightesttalent. This has been complimented by an aggressive workforce training requirement to ensure our workforce is ready for the ever evolving field of technology. We also have a few trusted partners who supply us with critical DBA skills during peak season.We are a truly global company with users in more than 120 countries. Our applications must be available at a reasonable performance and agreed upon SLA and have access to enterprise reference data with minimal outage. We have invested heavily in technologies that provide data availability with storage virtualization of SAN, global mirroring, and replication for data driven applications. We also drive operational data in nearrealtime to our data warehouse and other business intelligence applications by using message-based middleware, as well as ETL tools for on-premise, and iPaaS tools for cloud-based data transformation layers

Finding Success using NoSQL

We have some deployments of NoSQL based databases at NCR and we're carefully evaluating the use cases. We feel NoSQLworks well with document-based systems like our web applications and enterprise portals which are also populated with mostly unstructured data. We are also finding success using NoSQL for data caching applications