The book “Everybody Wants to Rule the World: Surviving and Thriving in a World of Digital Giants,” written by Ray “R” Wang (pictured), principal analyst, founder and chairman at Constellation Research Inc., is a guide to help enterprises adapt and thrive among digital giants like Google, Facebook and Amazon.

“If you look at 2017, the combined market cap of [those companies and] Microsoft was $2 trillion,” Wang said. “Today, it is almost $10.2 trillion. It’s quintupled. That’s never happened, and there’s something behind that business model that they put into place that others have copied.”

Wang spoke with Dave Vellante, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the HPE GreenLake Announcement event. They discussed the digital disruption and creating data-driven digital networks. (* Disclosure below.)

Companies must create data-driven digital networks

The fundamental premise behind technology giants such as Amazon and Google is about putting data at the core of their business, according to Wang. This helps them be able to traverse industries in ways never seen before.

The secret behind their long-term platforms is an idea that Wang calls data-driven digital networks. These platforms, like Facebook, create large memberships, they look at data, and then they look at figuring out how to actually win on data supremacy. This helps them monetize the data in a variety of ways.

“What they do really well is they disintermediate customer account control,” Wang said. “They take the relationships, aggregate them together. So food delivery app companies are a great example of that. Small businesses were out there with hundreds and thousands of customers. Today, what happens? Well, they’ve been aggregated. [There are] millions of customers together in food delivery app.”

It’s really about figuring how to automate that capture of data, according to Wang. Enterprises need to start in the cloud, bring the data together and start putting analytics, automation and AI into place. When a business can bring all that data information together, that’s powerful because it’s actually the context of data that is the glue, he explained. As an enterprise begins to mine contextual information from data, they have the ability to figure how to create a data-driven digital network.

“You have to have a data-to-decisions pathway,” Wang said. “You start with all types of data … you bring that together, and then you start mining and figuring out what patterns exist. Once you have the patterns, you can then figure out the next best action. And when you get the next best action, you compete on decisions, and that becomes a very important part. That decision piece — that’s going to be automated.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the HPE GreenLake Announcement event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the An HPE GreenLake Announcement event. Neither HPE., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE