by Angela Guess
Derrick Harris recently wrote about what he sees as the collision course of Big Data and cloud-computing: “‘Big data’ has become the new ‘cloud computing.’ I don’t mean that with regard to the technological aspects, but rather to the importance that vendors and customers alike have attached to the term. Just like every vendor now has a cloud product and every company has a cloud strategy in place, big data efforts also will become ubiquitous over the next couple years, and the two very well might merge in the near future.”
Harris continues, “The reasons for embracing big data might be entirely different than the reasons for embracing cloud computing. Cloud computing, at least for many users, is about offloading responsibilities that are a necessary cost of doing business, but that don’t necessarily do much to improve the business. Big data, on the other hand, is a different beast — at least for now. In many cases, it’s about looking at information in entirely new ways in order to improve whatever it is that company does. Whether they’re improving the effectiveness of advertising or actually inspiring new products, analytics efforts effect real business results.”
He goes on, “But like cloud computing, businesses realize that if they don’t have a big data story to tell or a big data strategy in place, they’ll very soon fall behind the curve. Companies that haven’t at least implemented a private cloud infrastructure will still be wasting resources managing IT tasks while their competitors have automated them and are investing those resource elsewhere. Soon, companies without analytics systems in place will be grasping at straws, relatively speaking, to determine what it is that customers want, while their competitors will be drawing actionable insights from data that tells them what customers want. For proof, just look at the incredible amount of Hadoop, NoSQL, analytic database and business intelligence action over the past year, and the past three months, in particular.”
photo credit: DaveBleasdale
