Zhang: Cloud and big data are expected to spawn subversive innovations

Microsoft Global Senior vice President, Microsoft (China) Co., Ltd. Chairman Zhang 20th blog "Cloud and large data is expected to lead to subversive innovation", the article proposed that cloud computing and large data combination will be the future of political, economic, scientific and technological, people's livelihood has been difficult to assess the impact. Whether it is to do the hardware, platform, or to do the application, to do the service, in the final analysis is the data as the core, data as the driving force to enhance the product to the user's gravity, strengthen the competitiveness of enterprises, to create new business opportunities. The full text reads as follows:

September 2008-July 2009, I used my spare time to summarize my thinking about the reality and future of cloud computing as the "cloud Computing Trilogy". At that time, cloud computing was a fresh and esoteric concept for many people, and now the cloud is within reach. Individual users upload documents, photos, videos, game archive records to the cloud for permanent preservation, corporate customers can build their own private cloud, or hosted, or rented the public cloud of IT resources and services, these are not new. Last November, we announced the bringing of Windows Azure platform into China, which means that the public cloud has become a mainstream service. As the killer application of cloud computing, "big data" has aroused the attention and discussion of many industry people recently, this article will focus on the relationship between large data and cloud, and how the combination of the two will affect the technology and business ecology.

Contention and large data of three platforms

Three years ago, for the first time, I put forward the "three competing platforms", which is doomed to a protracted battle. Today, the three-platform dispute has entered a new stage.

The first platform is the cloud. Because cloud computing infrastructure needs huge capital investment, long time, extensive deployment and continuous renewal maintenance, there are not many enterprises with enough resources and strength to build large-scale cloud computing platform. So at the time I said that there would not be too many companies in the world to be the masters of the Cloud platform, and now it seems that a handful of companies, including Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Rackspace, are in the first Legion.

We officially released the Windows Azure platform at the beginning of 2010. It integrates Microsoft's experience in cloud computing, innovative energy and the traditional advantages of ecosystems, which have grown rapidly over the past three years. With the official release of Microsoft's cloud operating system (including Windows server,windows Azure and System Center) in September 2012, and Microsoft's November collaboration with the Shanghai government and the century Internet, it announced that Windows The introduction of Azure platform and Office365 service into China marks a new phase in Microsoft's cloud computing practices in China.

The second platform is the smart terminal, which is essentially a battle between iOS, Android, and Windows. 2010, the "mobile three" competition has just begun. In the blink of an eye three years later, the war situation is more and more intense, and this battle will continue for a long time. Apple, Google, Microsoft are all trying to strengthen their own ecosystems, Microsoft in recent months, has announced Windows8, Windows Phone 8 and a series of new terminal platform, the current market response shows that Microsoft's transformation is basically successful.

More importantly, in addition to the common computing terminals, such as PCs, tablets, smartphones and game consoles, Microsoft has already focused on the broader, ubiquitous smart device layout, such as Smart cars, smart TVs, industrial equipment and handheld devices. The Windows Embedded8 Standard Preview, announced in November, supports touch and gesture interaction, allowing tens of billions of new machines to be connected to traditional it devices and networks. And from the 2012 and 2013 CES show, smart cars will become hotter and more popular.

The third platform is a social business and social platform that is above the cloud and ends, reflecting the real relationship. Never-interrupted cloud services and interconnected crowds with massive devices, the greatest opportunity is to develop a social network that reflects the relationship between human beings, human beings and machines, machines and machines in the real world, and creates a business and social platform that eliminates real and virtual boundaries, and is more humane, interactive and natural. , as well as applications. We can see that the attempt to digitize, network and commercialize the real social relations has already begun. But so far, the reality of the digital world is not enough, really beyond the national, ethnic and cultural barriers to the social network platform has not yet been completed, which is a major opportunity for China's IT industry.

Clearly, the three platforms, the cloud is the premise, is the foundation. I've said many times in the past that cloud computing is an infrastructure and business model that is being spawned in the context of more and more computing, more data, more dynamic, more real-time, and more and more need of a structured industry. Whether it is the cloud itself, or the intelligent terminal, or above the cloud and the end, based on the social network platform and application, will allow tens of millions of machines, businesses, individuals everywhere to acquire and generate new data, even under the support of Moore's Law, The evolution of the hardware performance of the computing device has not been able to keep up with the pace of data growth, and the problem is getting worse--and only the cloud can solve the problem of "giving data greater value". This leads to a new topic, but also the recent period of time industry and society are very concerned about the "big Data" topic.

The rise of "big data"

Today, the importance of large data is more and more obvious, but like cloud computing, it is not a new concept from the sky, but in three major factors driven by the gradual growth of mature.

The first driver is the three V (Volume, produced, Velocity) that the industry often says is big data, and these three V can have a variety of interpretations.

First look at the first V, the huge amount of data and data integrity. The data that the IT industry refers to has been born for more than 60 years. Until the PC spread to millions of households, due to the technical and cost constraints of storage, computing, and analysis tools, many of the signals that are worth recording in nature and human society do not form data-dozens of years ago, meteorology, geology, oil geophysical, publishing, media and film industry were large, continuous output signals, but at that time 90% The above is the storage of analog signals, it is difficult to use the calculation equipment and software for direct analysis. Governments and enterprises with large sums of money and talent can only extract, transform and load a few of the most critical signals into the database.

It is noteworthy that the industry on how to achieve the order of magnitude is a big data is not conclusive, in fact, in many industries in the application scenario, the size of the dataset itself is not the most important, whether the integrity is the most important.

The second V, which finds its intrinsic correlation, is found in a vast and varied range of data. In the internet age, a variety of devices through the TCP/IP network connected to a whole. Entering the Web2.0 era, PC users can not only access information through the network, but also become the creator and disseminator of information. At this stage, not only is the volume of data starting to explode, but the range of data is starting to grow-from a technical standpoint, it can be called structured data, semi-structured data, unstructured data, and streaming data. I remember that in 2005, Microsoft's annual "21st Century Calculation" conference set the theme "Data centric Computing", which is the "datacenter-centric computing", when we established the perception that value comes from data, or that Data has always been a valuable commercial asset--previously, people tend to focus too much on "computing and storage performance improvements", and since then we have been more concerned with "the efficiency of data analysis and processing"-analyzing, processing, and integrating massive data to find the "relevancy" of data that would otherwise seem irrelevant, Turn the seemingly useless data into useful information to support the judgments we make.

The third V can be understood to meet real-time demand faster. Today, through a variety of wired and wireless networks, people and people, the ubiquitous connection between man and various machines, machines and machines inevitably brings data exchange, and the key to data exchange is to reduce latency--to solve the delays caused by data generation, transmission, processing, storage, extraction, analysis, visualization, etc. Presented to the user in near real-time, which means less than 250 milliseconds.

Today, the need for real-time data is becoming clearer. Users want to drive to dinner, first use the map to query the location of the restaurant, expected traffic congestion, parking information and even other users of the restaurant comments. During the meal, he would use his cell phone to take pictures of food, edit short comments, post to Weibo, and use lbs to find people who ate at the same restaurant and see if there were any friends nearby ...

The second driving force is the popularity and mainstreaming of cloud computing. Often some friends ask me, "What's the difference between cloud computing and big data?" We've been talking about cloud computing for the last two years. In fact, cloud computing and big data are two sides of a coin, cloud computing is the IT foundation of large data, and big data is a killer application of cloud computing. As the popularity of cloud computing and become mainstream, let the above three V no longer become a challenge, but become the driving force of large data growth. On the other hand, because the data is more and more complex, more and more real-time, this is more need to deal with cloud computing, so the two are complementary. For example, the cost of storing 1TB data 30 years ago is about $1.6 billion trillion, and now it takes less than 100 dollars to store on the cloud, but stored data, if not mined and analyzed by cloud computing, is just zombie data, not much value.

The third driving force is the rapid development of artificial intelligence, machine learning and data mining technology. In this context, Microsoft has been able to provide users with three levels of end-to-end large data solutions-one is data management, that is, how to obtain, store and protect the data, the second is the rich data, that is, how to clean and discover the data correlation between different data, third, the data insight, namely through analysis, presentation and decision tools, Gain insight and ultimately value by putting into action.

In layman's parlance, the signal is transformed into data, the data is analyzed as information, the information is refined into knowledge, and knowledge is used to make decisions and actions. Ultimately, the ultimate significance of large data is to gain insight and value, which is also the fourth V (value) of large data, which is more important than the previous three v.

Cloud and large data reshaping technology and business ecology

What is less known is that the combination of cloud computing and big data is the first to affect the scientific community.

In January 2007, my colleague at Microsoft and a very respectable scientist, Jim Gray, Jim Grey a picture of "the fourth paradigm of scientific research" in a speech to the Committee on Computer Science and telecommunications. The so-called "IV paradigm" refers to scientific research based on data-intensive computing-Jim Grey called for funding the development of user data collection, management and analysis tools, and called for funding an exchange and release of infrastructure. In his vision, data-intensive science consisted of three basic activities: acquisition, management and analysis. The sources of data are international scientific alliances of various sizes and attributes, labs and even personal life, you need to create a series of common tools to support the entire process of data acquisition, validation, management, analysis, and storage, while data analysis covers all aspects of the workflow, including building databases, modeling and analyzing, Data visualization, and so on. Jim Grey's last speech embodied the vision and ambition of the Turing Prize master.

In the business world, big Data has a lot of room for imagination.

The security situation in New York was bad in the 70 's. A young policeman named Jack Maipu (Jack Maple), based on his personal policing experience, developed a methodology for the prediction of crime, known as the "Future chart" (Sponsor of the future), which could be used to speculate on the time and place of a new case, based on the record data of past robberies. This method is really effective in 1994, the new New York Police chief developed the "future chart" electronic version, renamed to "CompStat", to promote the city's police system. CompStat's technology core is the crime mapping System (Crime Mapping System) and the Database acquisition system (DB Collection System), while Microsoft's Microsoft MapPoint, Access, Excel and other products provide a solid support for the two systems-based on a large number of data gathering, mining and analysis work, the New York Police Department tries to sum up the behavior of criminals in history, and effectively improve the city's law and order. According to the data, in 1995, the homicide rate in New York decreased by about 25%, and the incidence of vehicle thefts decreased by about 24%, and these figures were compstat with the continuous updating of IT hardware and software technology and the continuous improvement of the COMPSTAT system.

In the future, it may not be a dream to completely curb crime through technical means so that residents of every city and region will always be safe. In August 2012, Michael Bloomberg, New York mayor, Bloomberg the veil of the Metropolitan Perception System (Das,domain awareness) developed by the NYPD and Microsoft. The system will cover the entire New York of more than 3,000 surveillance cameras, more than 2,600 radiation detectors, hundreds of license plate information collection of information collected into the police database, can be combined with detection data, real-time images, 911 alarm phone calls and police accumulated crime history files, Help the police more accurately detect and target upcoming criminal activities and suspects.

For business competition participants, big data means exciting business and service innovation opportunities. Retail chain Enterprises, electric business giants have been in large data mining and marketing innovation has a lot of success stories, they are very sensitive to business acumen, the courage to invest in the future of the company, and thus obtain a generous return.

This is especially true for small businesses with industry experience and a good command of cloud computing development and application skills, particularly start-ups. In recent years, we have seen some of the star start-ups, such as Cloudera, Splunk, Klout, TellApart, and so on, the size of only dozens of people, but a strong knowledge of an industry, and through the cloud and large data technology to quickly solve the industry's common needs and pain points- In the next few years, such "small but fine", "fast and accurate" enterprises will be more and more, and make a possible change in the world of subversive products. It is good to see that in Beijing Zhongguancun, at Microsoft's Cloud Accelerator two, there are similar start-up companies to join, and the Silicon Valley, Haifa entrepreneurs to grasp the pulse of the Times.

All in all, the combination of cloud computing and large data will have an immeasurable impact on the future politics, economy, technology and people's livelihood. Whether it is to do the hardware, platform, or to do the application, to do the service, in the final analysis is the data as the core, data as the driving force to enhance the product to the user's gravity, strengthen the competitiveness of enterprises, to create new business opportunities. Data has been considered a valuable resource, and any ambitious, eager-looking enterprise should develop large data strategies and programmes as early as possible. Otherwise, all opportunities will be delayed by the "data gap".

(Responsible editor: Fumingli)