- Cloud Getting Clearer, Big Data Getting Nearer
By Michael Wilke, Director, Marketing, EMC Backup Recovery Systems
I had the opportunity to sit in on Joe Tucci and Pat Gelsinger’s keynote at Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco. Now, I was fully expecting to hear a continuation of the Cloud and Big Data messages Joe and Pat have been delivering for the past year, and I did. But what I wasn’t expecting was the response of the crowd. It was, well, different. There was a definite sense in the room that the technology trends of which Joe and Pat spoke weren’t just ideas spouted by a vendor, but had become part of mainstream IT consciousness. Why do I say that? Well, for several reasons.
First, coming into the show I had been seeing more and more real-life examples of cloud implementations (all flavors) delivering tangible benefits to customers of all sizes and types. Take for example the tire company that EMC highlighted in a recent press release, deploying a virtualized private cloud infrastructure. This is not a high-tech company eating its own dog food; this is a very mainstream retailer adopting cloud to gain business advantages. At OpenWorld, we got more insight into the real-world potential of the journey to the cloud. Everything from the agility that can be possible with “IT as a Service” to the simplification of some of the more mundane IT processes like database provisioning, as Chad Sakac demo’d during Pat’s segment yesterday.
Big Data is becoming more than something we associate only with cutting-edge research, in areas like genomics and geophysics. Chad had a humorous take on the impact of Big Data in a more common encounter with every-day life. Okay, his example of how big data could be used to change the way auto insurance companies quote premiums, was a little out there, but not too far. Cloud and Big Data are now clearly in the “rubber hitting the road” stage.
And if EMC’s presentations were not convincing enough, you only needed to look around the show to see where Oracle is placing its bet.
So, when Joe talks about Cloud + Big Data = Massive Change + Massive Opportunity, he’s right. But what is becoming more obvious to me is that this wave of change is moving quickly. Now’s the time to paddle out and catch it because it’s going to be an awesome ride!
