What does it mean to be a “data company”?

A company that is data driven in how it does business and makes decisions. A companmy that is not driven by annecdotes!

I see being a "data company" as similar to being a "digital" company. Different meanings, but both can apply. However, I see the term digital company as one that is more inclusive of also being a data company. 

I believe every company should be chasing their best data selves. So in the long term (2-5 years) most companies will likely be identifying as one or all 3 of the following:
1. Technology company
2. Digital business
3. Data Driven (or data company) 

To me the basic term of data company means you are successfully utilizing the data collected and generated by you, your partners, your customers and the environments that could influence your companies product or services.

I genuinely believe that not only every company is going to be a technology company, there are going to be data and AI companies. Initially people got excited in 2014/15. Statistical models became AI. And people didn't even understand what that was, but they applied statistical modeling. So that issue is on both sides, on the enterprise seesaws as well as the startups. Because when you apply statistical modeling, all you're doing is anomaly detection. Which means when you have those 70%, 80% false positives, you got to spend time and invest effort into reducing and weeding those false positives out to get to a stage where truly you're able to figure out the signal. Everybody wants answers yesterday. Nobody wants to invest six months doing that.

Rather than trying to look at the perimeter, you keep hearing, don't trust anything. You have seen ZTA all over the place, let's go to Zero Trust. Fantastic. That's great. But how do you start opening it up? Again, you're going back to the same access model, you're not trusting anybody you're giving access to what? Compute or data? So again, we are conflicted. Should I extend that trust all the way to the data, or am I going to stop at an access level to the compute, which means from the compute I'm going to go to the data. You have to protect your data. Software is your true differentiator today. All of us are becoming data companies and software companies.