Every digital action adds another piece to the consumer puzzle constantly being analyzed by enterprises eager to approach the market from new, better-informed angles. With 2.5 quintillion bytes of data created each day, the opportunities to leverage valuable insights from user-generated data is only increasing with the proliferation of internet of things devices that provide a steady stream of digital choices ripe for analysis. That is, if businesses can keep up with the influx.

The speed at which data is created means businesses can compile a fairly comprehensive consumer profile, but one that could just as quickly become irrelevant as users make new digital choices. For organizations operating with outdated infrastructures unable to process at pace, much of data’s potential is wasted.

“You can’t have stale data … because you are actioning based on something that happened five minutes ago,” said Anjul Bhambhri (pictured), vice president of platform engineering at Adobe Inc.

To bring legacy enterprises up to speed in their customer experience marketing, Adobe has introduced a simplified real-time data analysis component into its cloud platform that processes data at the edge, and ensures businesses have the opportunity and resources to leverage all the information at their disposal.

Bhambhri spoke with John Furrier (@furrier) and Jeff Frick (@JeffFrick), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during Adobe Summit in Las Vegas (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

This week, theCUBE spotlights Anjul Bhambhri in our Women in Tech feature.

The ‘stale’ enterprise challenge

Delivering the consistent experiences customers have come to expect from a market moving ever closer toward instant gratification requires keen attention to the user interactions that inform their relationship to a business service. The most-effective customer experience strategies have a comprehensive perspective on the entire customer life cycle, which requires an infrastructure built to adapt to each evolution of digital interactions.

“As you build the holistic view of the customer, it’s not that you just build it once and forget it,” Bhambhri said. “The interactions customers are having with brands are through web, mobile devices, apps. Businesses have to understand that whole journey.”

Every transaction, search or click made around the world is a data-rich event, but that data can only be utilized if it’s read and implemented at the source in real time. A delayed analysis is a missed opportunity, evidenced frequently in the redundant targeted ads delivered to consumers who have long completed their purchases.

“[When] you buy something and you’re still getting ads of that same product that you buy even a day or two days later … that’s because that brand has a stale profile,” Bhambhri stated.

To keep data “hot,” it must be processed in the same place the event occurred with as little latency as possible and then contextualized across an entire environment in real time. “There is a lot of interactional data and bringing it all together to understand that holistic view of the customer is super important. This is where edge computing comes into the picture,” she added.

Analyzing data at the event site enables faster implementation and business action, but keeping up with the speed of data entering from endpoints worldwide is a challenge for many legacy enterprises still operating in traditional data silos. The new Adobe Experience Platform aims to untangle cloud complexities around edge.

“The architecture of the platform … is based on the cloud, and it’s a big data stack, completely a [software as a service] offering. But there is also a big edge computing part of the platform … where all the hot data is collected, processed and actioned,” Bhambhri said.

Keeping data hot

As Adobe expands its offerings to address new cloud markets, Bhambhri’s team is focused on optimizing integrations across channels to ensure customer data can be accessed and utilized efficiently. The Adobe Experience Platform was specifically designed to eliminate the silos inhibiting data collaboration in large legacy organizations and ensure information from a range of endpoints can be understood through a common language to streamline analysis and implementation.

The system develops and updates a comprehensive customer profile with real-time data and predictive artificial intelligence so businesses can identify and deliver on needs at the exact moment they are realized.

“Gathering this data, curating … having a common data dictionary … organizing it for that holistic view of the customer … so that you can do [business intelligence] and reporting, is all something that we pull together in the platform layer,” Bhambhri said.

Adobe’s $1.68-billion acquisition of Magento Inc. in 2018 provided the e-commerce foundation for the company to launch its Commerce Cloud, an arm of the Experience Cloud platform intended to optimize customer experience for digital business through improved inventory and business metrics tracking. The company’s entire cloud environment is rooted in strong integration capabilities, robust edge processing, and automation tools that lift a heavy burden off of enterprise operations.

“Whether … you are doing [artificial intelligence] and [machine learning] … or targeting these customers with personalized content, you are doing it on a single version of the truth, which is the real-time customer profile that powers all of these different clouds,” Bhambhri stated.

Freedom at the edge

Providing the infrastructure and simplified management to support optimized customer marketing analytics maximizes the value of data available to enterprises and also gives IT and executive teams the freedom to focus more on the strategic aspects of running their business and less on tedious structural challenges.

“By Adobe taking care of all this heavy lifting … IT will be able to meet the requirements of the line of business much faster. There’s going to be the agility that is needed to support the business,” Bhambhri said.

A survey of 1,000 U.S.-based information technology executives and decision makers recently released by Adobe showed that as much as two-thirds of an enterprise workers’ time is devoted to the manual management of legacy software systems. The Experience Platform will enable workers to reallocate that time toward innovation, according to Bhambhri.

“They can really focus on the insights that they are getting and making decisions based on that insight, and not get caught in how to build all of these different pieces,” she said.

As data scales with the increasing integrations of consumer and technology, Bhambhri is excited at the prospect of a market fully equipped to extract and act on its value.

“People recognize the importance of how data is critical to delivering delightful experiences. We are bringing experience makers, developers, [and] data scientists all together,” she concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Adobe Summit 2019. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Adobe Summit 2019. Neither Adobe Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE