Will BI Float In The Clouds?
August 29, 2008 BI Solutions, Cloud Computing No CommentsJust as business intelligence is revolutionizing business logic; virtualisation and cloud computing are revolutionizing computing power.
Cloud computing is the latest method of accessing computing power and according to ICT analyst IDC “this will be the prevailing form of ICT service delivery for a couple of decades”. Cloud computing is also known as onDemand applications and Software as a Service [SaaS].
The computing model has been transformed from in-house systems to outsourced, centralised systems and is predicted to become the norm for all businesses over the next 20 years. Even in remote countries such as New Zealand, media giant Google is to provide access to applications via the internet to 50,000 students, staff and alumni.
Google Apps
Google is just one cloud computing front-runner, as yet the market has yet to be measured but as a sign, Google claims to have 500,000 business customers worldwide for its internet-delivered Google Apps, and is reportedly signing up new ones at a rate of 3000 a day. Google Apps is very popular with academia, with education customers provided with free access rights to Google Apps Education Edition, which includes email, Google Docs (word processing, spreadsheet and presentation software), a shared calendar, instant messaging, website creation software and the ability to create a customised web home page using their own domain. This is providing a far superior service to that currently offered by most Universities.
Commercial customers are charged US$50 ($71) per user, per year.
For all organizations, cloud computing removes the development and hardware overheads of standard corporate applications and frees the IT resources to concentrate on more strategic technology.
Speed
The main constraint is relying on fast, reliable Internet access. In many countries, such as New Zealand, India, South Africa and Australia this is far from a current reality. Speed is the number one thing to users in terms of such services.
Reliability
Many businesses also have a perception hurdle to overcome if the servers hosting the applications and corporate data are hosted outside of their own country. Im most cases, large vendors of such services have extremely reliable geographic fail over redundancy and the location of the primary server is of little consequence. It is more of a emotive issue than a technological one.
Even Google doesn’t disclose where its data centers are located but it does reveal that its services network is distributed across global infrastructure …”for redundancy and availability and ensuring continuity of service.”
Google attempts to overcome the connectivity issues by designing its service to be efficient across all kinds of connections and ‘Google Gears’ – a platform that allows users to take web services offline. They are also investing in infrastructure to the overcome service latency and ensure services can be delivered at high speed in the Asia-Pacific region.
Other Cloud Contenders
Other companies such as Microsoft, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, SAP, EMC, Cisco and Oracle are building massive cloud services delivery capabilities. We can expect a major market impact within the next 2 to 3 years.
The BI Cloud
Cloud computing offers a major boost for smaller businesses seeking the insight of business intelligence. Most do not have sufficient in-house infrastructure or budget to sustain their own BI hosted solutions. SaaS models offer a viable alternative, even if the feature set is somewhat constrained.
