PLANNING AND LEADERSHIP FOR A BETTER WORLD
PLANNING AND LEADERSHIP FOR A BETTER WORLD With the holidays upon us, now is the time for the inevitable lists that reflect on the closing year and look ahead to 2012. We’re guilty of it here at Ziff Davis Enterprise, too. Our research director has just completed his 2012 predictions for "Baseline" magazine and right in the middle of his “top 10” list is business intelligence and "big data," wrapped together in a bundle with business analytics, knowledge management and cross-platform data reporting.
Am I surprised? Well, yes and no. Business intelligence and big data certainly belong on the list. But has IT really given BI its due with a middle-of-the pack showing? It’s hard to displace the twin turbos of mobility and cloud from the top of IT’s collective consciousness, but they and the rest of the list might actually be subsumed by BI/BA and big data. Look at a few other big trends, and see how that might be so.
Mobility/BYOD: The consumerization of IT has been driven by consumers of big data--the executive and mobile sales organizations that need insight here, now, and on their phones or tablets about what’s really happening for their customers. The need to take the building cascade of data in the enterprise and turn it into action that drives bottom-line profitability growth has put iPads and Galaxies in the hands of millions of information-hungry business users.
The Cloud: Everyone’s talking about cloud, and one of the biggest benefits IT is looking to gain is the flexibility to sustain growth spurts out of their private cloud (or data center) by “cloud-bursting” out to the public cloud. What could cause this need? We’ve handled seasonal growth just fine for the last 40 years. That was before big data, though. I haven’t done a calculation of the amount of data we now collect per transaction. I remember not too long ago an average of about 256 bytes for a single sales transaction on most of the manufacturing systems I worked on. With digital imaging of orders, rich media for product information and how-to videos now associated with nearly every transaction, it’s easily thousands of times that. As a result, big data has helped drive public cloud adoption by offering a safety cushion, which once resided in the enterprise data center and was left unused until the busy season.
The Network: Another big area of IT investment has been in the network--network optimization, new network infrastructure, new wireless deployments, new converged fabrics--all to support what? Less data? Our industry excels at shrinking everything down, cramming more into less space, but sometimes the laws of physics become a real wall and 186,000 miles per second just isn’t fast enough. Damn you, Albert! Why are Brocade, Cisco, Riverbed, Juniper and the rest of the network universe continuing to thrive? We need more room on the pipes for more data to be delivered wirelessly to an ever-growing cadre of globe-trotting tablet-thumpers--us.
So as you look at this year’s IT predictions and top 10 lists, remember that some of them might not even have made it if not for big data.
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