Breakthrough barriers: Cloud BI and analysis interest growth

Hurricane Irene attacked New York, and Phil Green didn't know what was going to change his vision of technology forever.

His greatest concern was a park called Flushing Meadows, the hometown of U.S Open. Tournament-The final grand slam of the four tennis championships each year. But Green is not worried about the gale and about the likely impact of the game. Instead, as media director of the American Tennis Association (USTA), he is concerned with more basic things: electricity.

"We've heard things like this," he said.

For an employee who helps oversee usopen.org, power outages are like death rulings. In the two-week race, the site traffic will peak to the year. These visits come from updating articles, photos, videos, and analytics. Irene soon became entangled in the plan.

But there are potential solutions. Green agreed to allow representatives from IBM to use technology to do something for USTA. Transfer infrastructure and tools to the cloud until the storm is over and let employees keep updating the site.

"No hesitation," he said, "Is there a little nervousness?" Of course. ”

Unlike the 180-degree shift in green and USTA, many companies are reluctant to embrace cloud computing. To be fair, most companies have not experienced the time to either do or possibly end, especially in the face of this decision. Nor is there a manufacturer ready to provide this product and support. However, recent research has shown that cloud computing is spreading, especially business intelligence (BI) and analytics, and that the number of planned deployments in the near future will increase significantly.

Elasticity is the key

According to TechTarget Cloud Pulse survey results, more than half of the respondents are using cloud IT services and applications. 643 for respondents detailed their current use of the cloud IT services, 32% said is bi and analysis.

Although the figure seems high, William McKnight is not surprised, saying that BI and analytics have broad implications and are more decentralized in practice.

"The thought that we were taught was to think that we were running the company in analysis," said McKnight, president of the McKnight consulting firm, "but it should be shallow, not an omen analysis." ”

Technically, the cloud has a good side, McKnight said. Can save deployment of people and infrastructure costs and time, but the key feature is resilience.

"The very good thing about the cloud is that you don't have to anticipate the exact time you're going to need," she said. And if you're fit for a public cloud provider to collaborate, when your allocations run out, their hardware is ready. You can continue to expand. ”

The cloud is also the asset for the business to embark on a big data analysis tour, according to Mark Theissen, the CEO of Cirro, a company offering products that connect Hadoop to BI tools. Large data includes multiple structured data, such as text, which is fast and diverse and difficult to load into traditional databases. The challenge for the business is to find workspaces, some of which have been transferred to the cloud in the form of Hadoop technology. Open source Hadoop is well known for its rapid consumption and massive data storage, regardless of the form of data that can be carried out across distributed computing environments. However, Hadoop is still a mainstream technology, and use cases are hard to find.

"In the struggle against this challenge, the majority of the efforts I have seen are the leaders of large enterprises," Theissen said. "They have money, data, and they know that they are looking for more competitive elements." ”

Private cloud or public cloud

Business because embracing the cloud may grow rapidly, however, Theissen says they tend to be private clouds rather than public cloud products, primarily for security and usability reasons.

"We are very early in applying the public cloud to BI and analytics," Theissen said, "and others are more concerned with private clouds or hybrid cloud implementations." ”

This is precisely what USTA's case shows, the continued use of IBM's proprietary cloud products. But according to Cloud Pulse survey results, even this will change. When asked what kind of service the respondents would use in a public cloud or a private cloud or mixed cloud for the next six months, 24.5% of the 351 people represented BI and data management.

The results proved to be the most popular bi and data management options in the next six months that have won 17.1% per cent growth compared with the present. Next comes the hybrid cloud, 15.1% growth.

Part of the increase may be due to market maturity. Razorfish, a labeled analytics service provider, was sold to Publicis Groupe two years ago by Microsoft and moved to a hybrid cloud. The company explained to the client that it was a transition, Razorfish BI Vice President Matt Comstock introduced.

"We're selling because services are going to be cheaper and more reliable than we are," Comstock said, although he added that his clients typically reside in marketing rather than it.

Now Razorfish is an Amazon Web services customer, performing almost all of the data and analytics capabilities in the cloud. The company uses Hadoop to pull in unstructured data, Teradata-aster converts the data into structured data, and then they analyze it.

As for conventional shipping issues, such as security, Comstock said it was never a problem.

"We had one or two downtime," he said, referring to Amazon's Christmas downtime, which affected his company, "but you've got a lot of valuable experience and you don't have to sacrifice time and cost in-house to learn, which is an added benefit." ”

(Responsible editor: The good of the Legacy)