A Fortune 100 technology company had built a data fabric offering, an architecture for connecting, governing and sharing data across on-premise systems, multiple clouds and outside sources, and had made it a pillar of its digital transformation story. Data fabric was still a young idea. Analysts were promoting it, vendors of every size were claiming it, and the enterprises expected to buy it were only beginning to work out what it meant for them.
The company's marketing and product leadership wanted an honest, outside-in view before committing further positioning and campaign spend. How did the data leaders of large enterprises actually define data fabric, and how far along were they? Which vendors did they associate with it? What did they think of the company itself, based on their own experience rather than its marketing? And which of the company's proposed use-case messages would land with them? The answers had to come from senior practitioners, not only from the company's own customer base, and they had to be candid.
PP&A designed and led the data fabric track of a broader brand-perception program, delivered in two phases over five months. In the first phase, the team conducted ten in-depth interviews with chief data officers and heads of data, analytics and data science at large enterprises in North America, Europe, Latin America, Asia and Australia, spanning consumer goods, retail, financial services, energy, life sciences and industrials, and mixing current customers, past customers and organizations that had never considered the client. Discussions covered how digital transformation was driven in each organization, what data fabric meant to them, where they stood on deployment, the vendor landscape and their view of the client and its offering.
An interim report preceded a second phase of ten further interviews with a new set of data and technology leaders across the United States, Europe and Asia-Pacific. This round added the client's next questions: the day-to-day role of the data leader, where they get their information, whether sustainability influences their data and procurement decisions, and how they ranked the five use-case messages the client was preparing to take to market.
The team analyzed every interview against a common framework so findings could be compared across phases, sentiment toward the client tallied rather than left anecdotal, and each positioning recommendation tied to specific evidence.
The interim and phase-two reports gave the client a grounded picture of a market still forming. They covered how data leaders define data fabric and how far along they are, what stands in their way, which vendors they associate with the category, how they view the company and why, where they get their information and how the proposed use-case messages ranked. Because PP&A tallied sentiment toward the client in both phases, the second round could test whether the first-phase pattern held.
Overall, enterprises treated data fabric as an architecture built over several years rather than a product bought off the shelf. The reports gave marketing and product leadership an evidence base for resetting its data fabric positioning and for choosing which use-case messages to take to market.
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