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Harnessing the Power of Big Data and BI in the Cloud

By April 29, 2012Article

Last week, THINKstrategies, the Cloud Computing Showplace and Rising Tide Media hosted over 200 corporate executives interested in how they can capitalize on today’s rapidly evolving cloud alternatives to overcome escalating Big Data and business intelligence (BI) challenges.

The event was the Cloud Analytics Summit at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif., and the goal was to provide an intimate forum to discuss the realities and possibilities created by cloud-based analytics and data integration solutions.

THINKstrategies believes that analytics is core to the value proposition of the cloud. Analytics are a key feature of every leading Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) application. But it goes well beyond that.

Today’s leading Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) providers are offering data storage resources at a fraction of the cost of traditional servers which makes capturing and retaining the exploding volumes of data more cost-effective.

And multi-tenant SaaS vendors can track user behavior and aggregate user metadata in such a way that they can continuously enhance their applications and add new value to their customers in the form of industry benchmarks and other timely statistics.

The Cloud Analytics Summit sought to provide a status report on these exciting developments through the eyes of corporate executives from innovative companies pioneering these new technologies and the CIOs in the vanguard of deploying them.

The day kicked off with Ju-kay Kwek, product manager, Google Cloud Platform team and Raj Pai, CEO & co-founder of Claritics, discussing how cloud-based solutions are beginning to fulfill the promise of Big Data analysis. Their talk and demo was followed by a panel of executives from MicroStrategy, Quantivo, Fusion-io, AppFirst and GoodData who brought Ju-kay and Raj’s ideas to life with real-world cloud BI success stories.

Jane Griffin, principal, Deloitte Consulting LLP and US Deloitte Analytics Leader, used the cloud-based presentation tool, Prezi, to show how capitalizing on cloud analytics can enable enterprises and SMBs to corral Big Data, social media and mobility. Jane’s presentation was followed by another panel composed of the CIO of Splunk, director of Product Insights and head of Analytics at Facebook, and executives from Alteryx, Birst, LogiXM and Pervasive Software.

Anjul Bhambhri, vice president of Big Data at IBM’s Silicon Valley Lab, gave a talk about smarter decision making to better leverage Big Data and gain new actionable insights, which teed up a panel discussion about specific cloud analytics customer success stories led by a venture partner at Trident Capital and consisting of the CIO and VP of Operations at Host Analytics, CTO of Jobvite and CEOs at PivotLink, Ayasdi and Skytree.

Kognitio VP of Cloud Solutions, Ian Bird, described how to measure the success of today’s cloud analytics, BI and Big Data solutions, followed by a panel that examined how organizations are leveraging cloud integration solutions to bring data together composed of representatives of SoftServe, MuleSoft, Information Builders, Indicee and the SVP/CIO at Informatica.

CloudTrigger CEO, Lonnie Wills, presented his views about how organizations can overcome the barriers to success in cloud analytics, BI and Big Data. And, a final panel led by the founder of the Growth Process Group and consisting of executives from Agilis Solutions, CompTIA, Collective[i], and SAP’s HANA unit debated how cloud analytics can create new customer value the senior manager of text analytics at Zynga and CTO/Editor of CITOResearch.

The day gave the attendees a better understanding of the state of the cloud analytics industry and appreciation of the growing assortment of alternatives at their disposal.
The key takeaways from the summit can be summarized into the following points:

  • The cloud is providing timely, economical and scalable resources for businesses of all sizes to grapple with their escalating data and BI needs at the SaaS, PaaS and IaaS layers.
  • Cloud-based analytics solutions are being deployed across a wide array of industries ranging from media, retail and banking to government, telecom and utilities.
  • Despite the increasing ease-of-use of today’s cloud analytics solutions, there is still a growing need for specialized skills to fully deploy and utilize these solutions, which is fueling the growth of new and established professional service firms focused on cloud BI and Big Data engagements.

The second part of THINKstrategies’ Cloud Innovators Summit series will be the Cloud Management Summit on June 19 at the Computer History Museum again. SandHill.com readers can save 10 percent when they register by using discount code SH12 at http://www.amiando.com/cms.html.

Jeffrey Kaplan is the Managing Director of THINKstrategies and founder of the Cloud Computing Showplace. He can be reached at jkaplan@thinkstrategies.com.

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