Problems worthy of attack prove their worth by hitting back. —Piet Hein

Friday 13 June 2008

"The Next Big Thing"

James Hamilton on The Next Big Thing:
Storing blobs in the sky is fine but pretty reproducible by any competitor. Storing structured data as well as blobs is considerably more interesting but what has even more lasting business value is the storing data in the cloud AND providing a programming platform for multi-thousand node data analysis. Almost every reasonable business on the planet has a complex set of dimensions that need to be optimized.

I think we're only beginning to see interesting data processing being done in the cloud - there's much more to come.

1 comment:

Theodore Omtzigt said...

Tom:

I totally agree with you that data processing in the cloud is going to be the next revolution. The past couple of weeks I have been working through the economics of cloud computing. That analysis points in the direction of the impending division between organizations that use data mining versus those organizations that do not. I believe that the organizations that do not extract information from their operational data will be served quite economically by Google and Rackspace , but those organizations that want to differentiate through data mining will want to keep the cloud under their own control. The amount of data manipulation that needs to take place to organize the data for analysis and the final analysis itself is highly unstructured since the organization tries to discover trends and act upon the data as it is found. This requires that the data and the software that contains the data is closer to the developer/business analyst and thus is more productively managed in house.

Theo