Companies with data in their DNA are crushing old-school competitors — look at Uber Technologies Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. in the taxi and retail markets. The irony is that older businesses have data too; they may have oodles more of it than the newcomers disrupting them. Can predictive analytics for that legacy data give them a startup makeover and save their hides?

“Revenue is at risk of disruption across pretty much every industry,” said Laura DuBois (pictured), group vice president of enterprise storage, servers and infrastructure software for International Data Corp.

Companies are scrambling to figure out their weak points before Silicon Valley entrepreneurs do. They know that anything they can do, a savvy startup might do better with a killer application. Rather than curse the disruptive darkness, instead light a candle with the same tech the scary startups use, DuBois advised. That includes big data and analytics software — both of which legacy businesses have at their avail.

Aside from tools that companies can pay for, some things they cannot buy can help edge out competition, according to DuBois. These are the best practices and behaviors of companies putting real muscle behind their data. After all, every company has data and can pay for the latest analytics software. Competing at the upper tier must depend on unique ways people in an organization work the data.

IDC teamed up with NetApp Inc. to quantify the real-world behaviors of businesses thriving with data as opposed to just surviving. Their research gauges what businesses are doing right and wrong in the data-driven digital transformation. DuBois joined Brett Roscoe (pictured), vice president of product and solutions marketing at NetApp Inc., during an interview at the NetApp Insight event in Berlin, Germany. They spoke with Rebecca Knight (@knightrm) and Peter Burris (@plburris), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio. (* Disclosure below.)

This week, theCUBE spotlights Laura DuBois in our Women in Tech feature.

Survival of the fittest fast-forward

Anyone doubting the ever-nearer threat of disruption across industries need only look the Fortune 500 list. In 1955, the life expectancy for a company on the list was 75 years; by 2015, it was just 15 years. Who comes out on top in this new, rapid turnover cycle?

“During the early 2000s, banks and oil companies were the most valuable corporations,” wrote technologist Rob Versaw in Forbes. “Now companies that collect, maintain and use petabyte upon petabyte of data top S&P’s market capitalization list.”

Consumers have come to expect a different kind of experience from companies, one through which data constantly flows. It is a two-way relationship in which the company talks with consumers, not at them. Customers reared online expect context-based ads, intelligent suggestions, and spot-on recommendations, according to Versaw. This personalization is not possible without regular — nay constant — data deep-diving expeditions.

“Companies with the most potential to grow and snag market share use data more efficiently than their competitors,” Versaw stated.

Looking at some of the largest companies that are no longer around — such as Blockbuster LLC, Borders Group Inc., and RadioShack — DuBois discussed their demise. Blockbuster got Netflixed; Borders and RadioShack got Amazoned. In other words, companies who tailored customer experiences with data won their customer base from them.

“You look at every single industry — there’s disruption, and there’s the success of this new innovative company,” DuBois said.

Must the innovative company necessarily be new?

Something old and something new boost incumbents

The wealth of data incumbent businesses have stored is the ace up their sleeve, Megan Rimmer wrote in a post for Innovation Enterprise, where she is international events director. It is their primary advantage over startups, she stated.

Data doesn’t have to depreciate; new insight can come from old data with the right analytics strategy. In addition to data, incumbents have “brand loyalty, a global distribution network, and institutional know-how far in excess of their startup competitors, no matter how advanced their technology,” Rimmer wrote. “They can gain insight into future and emerging trends by applying machine learning analysis to the unstructured data on social media to understand what consumers are saying about both their offerings and those of their rivals, and any potential shift in their desires.”

It appears that few companies are doing these things regularly, iteratively and successfully, however. The NetApp-IDC research revealed that out of 800 companies surveyed, only 11 percent are data thrivers; the remainder are survivors or resistors. This means companies who learn to work smart with data can stand out from the pack — and their customers will notice.

Those companies which are underperforming use data on an ad hoc basis, according to DuBois. They lack well-aligned processes, and those methods they do try might be one-off or not repeatable.

The daily data grind

It’s said that success is the sum of small actions repeated every day. Data thrivers put data at the center of business every day — not when it strikes their fancy. This is why their chief data officers or experts in similar roles are integrated into information technology and into the business, DuBois explained.

“Enterprise architecture and these data roles very closely aligned is one example of a best practice in terms of the thriver organizations,” she said.

Technology makes it relatively easy to collect and analyze data. “What’s not easy is to action results out of that data to drive change in business processes, to drive change in how things are brought to market. I would say those are things that data thrivers are doing that, maybe, data survivors aren’t,” DuBois added.

It’s fair to ask if there’s a legitimate reason they’re not doing them, though. Are the thrivers by their nature more data-based than the survivors? For instance, isn’t an online dating site inherently more data-driven than an auto shop? The NetApp-IDC survey showed positive business impact from data across all industries. However, some businesses may be a more natural fit for data thriving, DuBois conceded, adding that it is worth researching further.

“Maybe that will be phase two,” she concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of NetApp Insight Berlin. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the NetApp Insight Berlin event. Neither NetApp Inc., the event sponsor, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE