Our latest blogpost, now on our website, unpacks some of the key takeaways from our newly published white paper, Modern Data Management for FMCG Analytics: Data Lake vs. Ontology Platform. The white paper, which was written by data technology thought leader Iggy Geyer, recently appointed as Chief Strategy Officer at Intenda, examines two different strategies that FMCG businesses can pursue to meet today’s data demands. Iggy weighs up the advantages and disadvantages of each, before making a recommendation as to which represents the better approach for FMCG businesses.

As anyone who has experience in the sector will tell you, the FMCG industry is bursting at the seams with valuable data. Be that as it may, many companies encounter the same difficulties when it comes to extracting business value from the abundance of data at their disposal. The challenges they face include slow time to value, high costs, limited return on investment and low trust in AI due to poor data quality. To overcome these challenges, FMCG companies can implement either a modern data lake using Azure’s native data services, or a modern ontology platform. 

Serving as a central repository for raw data, Azure Data Lake Storage offers scalability, cost-effectiveness, the flexibility to ingest data from diverse sources without predefined schemas, and seamless integration with the Microsoft ecosystem. On the flip side, ensuring data quality and consistency is difficult, limited semantic understanding can hinder data exploration, and siloed analytics may impede actionable insights.

An ontology platform, on the other hand, organises and structures data meaningfully, unifying data from various silos without requiring data migration. While this approach enhances data integration and governance, improves semantic understanding and provides a unified environment for data access and analysis, it too has its downside: Implementing a solution of this kind requires a significant upfront investment. In addition, ontology platforms offer less flexibility than data lakes, and come with the risk of technology lock-in.

After giving the advantages and disadvantages of both a data lake and an ontology platform due consideration, Iggy ultimately advocates for one over the other. To find out which approach is recommended for FMCG businesses, visit our blog, from where you can download the white paper itself at no cost.