TDWI Cloud BI Solution Summit Roundup

Last week, I attended the TDWI Cloud BI Solution Summit as a speaker. I was fortunate enough to sit through some of the other presentations and I learned something interesting about the market place for Big Data and Cloud: not everyone is ready for it. This may sound like a given; American organisations are way ahead of Canadian organisations, but I found that there are still some fairly big fish out there that are still grappling with these concepts in the US.

Initially, I figured that the audience, composed mainly of senior IT people, middle managers, and executives, was up to speed with cloud computing and that its use was a forgone conclusion. This was clearly not the case.

There were questions from attendees such as:

"What is cloud BI?"
"Where is the data?"

And, a response to informal polls showed that:

• The majority of organisations represented did not have a "cloud BI solution".
• Few were considering moving their BI to the cloud.
• Licensing is still a concern.
• Performance is a concern.
• Data lifecycle management in the cloud is a concern.

So, it would seem that, while Cloud Computing (well, at least IaaS and SaaS; PaaS is coming into its own) has entered the vernacular of IT departments and some executive level suites, Big Data is still not there. Gartner has Big Data *just* entering the phase they call the "Peak of Inflated Expectations" which means that we are now looking to Big Data as a means of increasing our competitiveness without necessarily having the skills and knowledge of how to do so.

This leaves us in an interesting situation: if we can't do it ourselves, we have to subcontract to those who can. What are the costs? How is this agreement governed? If there are no stellar insights, whose fault is it? Is it even someone's fault? The fact that these questions exist is interesting because we're at the same stage we were at when the web came to prominence, when e-commerce was new, when the concept of outsourcing caught on, and more recently, as Cloud Computing became a new IT service delivery model.

The evolution of Big Data and its adoption will be interesting to follow. But one thing is for sure: look for Big Data to leverage public, low cost, commodity compute resources, and for more and more public cloud service providers to offer such services. After all, AWS has already launched such a service...