The rise of cloud BI and analysis: People's interest is growing

Some time ago, Hurricane Irene suddenly attacked New York, and Phil Green at this time it is not clear what may happen will completely change his vision of technology.

His greatest concern is a park called Flushing Meadows, the hometown of US Open. Tournaments - the final Grand Slam of four tennis tournaments each year - is completed. But Green is not worried about the gale and about the possible impact this game. Instead, as media director for the US Tennis Association, he is more concerned with the more fundamental: electricity.

"We heard something like this: 'It's going to be dead,'" he said.

For a staff member who helps oversee USOpen.org, power outages are like death rulings. In the two week contest, website traffic will peak each year. These visits come from updated articles, photos, videos and analyzes. Irene quickly became the tangle of this plan.

But there are potential solutions. Green agreed to allow representatives from IBM to use technology to do something for the USTA. That is, to transfer infrastructure and tools to the cloud until the storm passes and allow staff to continue updating the site.

"No hesitation," he said. "Is there a little bit nervous? Of course."

Unlike Green and USTA one hundred and eighty degrees big change, many companies barely embrace cloud computing. To be fair, most businesses have not experienced or are likely to finish playing, especially when faced with this decision. Neither is a vendor ready to offer this product and support. However, the latest research shows that cloud computing is gaining popularity, especially business intelligence (BI) and analytics, and the number of planned deployments will increase significantly in the near future.

Flexibility is the key

According to the 2012 TechTarget Cloud Pulse survey, more than half of respondents are using cloud IT services and applications. 643 gave respondents a detailed description of the cloud IT services they are currently using, 32% for BI and analytics.

Although this figure may seem high, William McKnight thought it was no surprise that he said BI and analysis have broad meanings and are more diversified in practice.

"The idea that we're being instilled is that we are running the company analytically," said McKnight, president of McKnight Consultants Inc. "But it should be shallow, not apocalyptic."

Technically, the cloud has its good side, McKnight said. You save on staffing and infrastructure costs and time, but the key feature is resiliency.

"The cloud is very good thing is that you do not have to predict in advance you will need the specific time," she said, "the solution is scalable and, if you are suitable for public cloud providers to cooperate, when your allocation runs out, their hardware Ready, you can keep expanding. "

The cloud is already the asset for businesses embarking on big data analytics and, according to Mark Theissen, CEO of Cirro Inc., which provides products that link data from Hadoop to BI tools. Big data includes multi-structured data, such as text, quickly diversified, and difficult to load into traditional databases. The business faces the challenge of finding workspaces, some of which have been transitioned to the cloud as Hadoop's technology. Hadoop, the open-source software, is known for its fast consumption and massive data storage, regardless of its form, across distributed computing environments. However, Hadoop is still a mainstream technology from time to time, and use cases are hard to find.

"Most of the efforts I've seen that I've seen in this challenge are really big business leaders," said Theissen. "They have the money and the data they know they want to be more competitive factor."

Private cloud or public cloud

Business may grow rapidly by embracing the cloud, but Theissen said they tend to favor private clouds rather than public cloud offerings, mostly for security and usability reasons.

"It's very early to apply public clouds to BI and analytics," said Theissen. "Others are more focused on private or hybrid cloud implementations."

This is exactly what the USTA case shows, continuing to use IBM's private cloud offerings. But according to the Cloud Pulse survey, things change. When asked what kind of service respondents would use in public cloud or private cloud or hybrid cloud in the next six months, 24.5% of 351 said BI and data management.

This result turns out to be a 17.1% increase in respondents' most preferred BI and data management options over the next six months as compared to the present. Followed by a hybrid cloud, 15.1% growth.

Part of the growth may be due to market maturity. Razorfish is a signage analysis service provider that was sold to Publicis Groupe two years ago by Microsoft to move to the hybrid cloud. The company explained to customers as a transition, according to Matt Comstock, vice president of Razorfish BI.

"We sold because services will be cheaper and more reliable than us," Comstock said, though he added that his clients typically reside in marketing rather than in the IT department.

Now Razorfish is a customer of Amazon Web Services and performs virtually any data and analytics function in the cloud. The company pulled into non-institutional data using Hadoop, and Teradata-Aster converted the data into structured data before they were reanalyzed.

As for regular shipping issues, such as security, Comstock said this is never a problem.

"We had one or two downtime," he said, referring to the Amazon Christmas crash that affected his company, "but you've got a lot of valuable experience without having to learn time and money internally This is an additional benefit. "