In this article: “Mining of Raw Data May Bring New Productivity, a Study Says – NYTimes” the NYTimes re-inforces one of the key points that EMC has made during the acquisitions of Greenplum, Isilon and most recently at EMC World: “Where Clouds Meet Big Data”. It seems like the analysts are catching up to one of my key theses: “Since Big Data is created in the cloud, it needs to be managed there, AND monetized there.” This thesis, I believe forces us to look exceedingly differently at all aspects of information management. The “Journey to the Cloud” isn’t just about the Enterprise projection to the Cloud (CDN styled), but the Enterprise exploitation of their cloud property (and position). Communities emerge around key topics, just as they do in [Hi-Tech] business: the valley, cambridge, and the like. But there needs to emerge a type of marketplace for the transfer of value. The job marketplace helped us with our initial “exchange” economy (1999-2010)- as employees moved, they built a portfolio of knowledge, relationships and tools. I think that a digital knowledge marketplace will emerge, extending insight based upon a more complete understanding of contextual information, and the ability to exploit this information for improved insights.
I believe, for many reasons, that this marketplace will happen quickly; big data sets acting as magnets for healthcare, financial services, public policy, even law enforcement / intelligence activities. Increasingly, if you are “far” from the market, your latency will be higher [time to insight], your context lower [quality of insight], all leading to a marginalization of value.
Another key point leading me to these centroids of market value: At a recent Internet conference, we learned from a backbone provider that 2013 will be a seminal year in which the gains in Data Center bisection bandwidth will exceed the bisection bandwidth of the Internet. This crossover will substantially Increase the benefits of co-residency – as moving big data can be quite expensive. The net result, we cannot just think about the hybridization of enterprise IT into clouds, we need to think about transacting in the cloud, close to the big data – improving value through deep operational analytics. Oh yeah, and mind your neighbor [friends close, enemies closer?]
