The Business Impact of the Cloud Computing II

[#1]

I attended the 10th international CloudExpo last week.  This was the first time that CloudExpo brought Big Data into the conference and drew more than 7,000 attendees at the Jacob Javits Center in New York. In my blog “The Business Impact of the Cloud Computing”, I reflected on my experience at the CloudExpo 2011; I wanted to use this blog to update readers with the new trends I observed this year.

Cloud space has been evolving in the following ways:

• Big Data has become a popular topic
• Cloud bursting has become a buzzword since demand grew for hybrid Cloud
• Businesses have started to use more than one Cloud vendor. Therefore,  Cloud  management tools have become more attractive
• New players are aggressively promoting their products. Success stories sell products; new players could get clients from existing vendors through utilizing them
• Open sources are increasingly promoted and appreciated
• Security was still a focus for conversation

What are the implications of some new business impacts according to the trend?

•  Researchers can obtain results faster with the power of elastic Cloud Computing.  It impacts the medical, mobile, energy and computing fields.  For example: A new drug formula to cure cancer could be formulated with increased speed, but the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval process might be too slow to match. This could create a big business impact to the whole life cycle of the new drug introduction.

• Big Data can quickly reflect customers’ needs and businesses will be under pressure to balance exploitation and exploration to become a more ambidextrous organization [1]. The business impact will show up on the budgeting, organizational structure, product life cycle, and partner relationships.

•  The open source trend can engage more developers to join the creation of Cloud products. It enables fast development and creates management challenges. Businesses will have to maintain balance between openness and quality/security.  The business impact will be on the product life cycle and its relationship with its partners.

• Aggressive promotion boosts brand recognition. For example: When logged into WiFi during the conference, we were directed to the Softlayer homepage.  That triggered the user’s curiosity to find out what Softlayer could offer. The business impact is that it will push businesses to be more creative with customer oriented marketing.

In summary, new trends will bring new business opportunities and challenges. Businesses that can adapt and move fast will have a better chance to win in the fast-changing Cloud and Big Data worlds.

[1] Ambidextrous Organizations: Managing Evolutionary and Revolutionary Change by Michael Tushman,  http://iic.wiki.fgv.br/file/view/Ambidextrous+organizations.pdf

[#2]

Could you share some insights about the impact to traditional data mining and search with regarding to Big data?  If big data are mainly about unstructured data. Is my understanding correct?

TIA

[#3]

Thank you for your inquiry. Big data refers to both structure and instructed data. Cloud data storage and tools can be used to manage big data more effectively. The impact to data mining is huge since data can be retrieved and analyzed rather quickly. Please refer to my blog on "Big Data is Your Big Business Opportunity" here.