Cloud Computing: 8 Ways To Build And Use The New Breed Of Data-Driven Applications
April 18, 2014
Grazed from Forbes. Author: Brian Ascher.
Software-as-a-Service and cloud computing has been transformational for the software industry, but compared to what is coming next, you ain’t seen nothing yet. First, to appreciate where we are heading a quick review of where we’ve been is in order. Back in the olden days of business software a software company sold you an application which you installed on your servers and desktops which made business processes more efficient, facilitated workflow, and sped up information retrieval. As you used it this software accumulated data such as your customer records, financial results and manufacturing statistics.
If you wanted to deeply analyze this data for trends and insights you bought Business Intelligence or Analytics packages from a different set of software vendors so you could slice and dice your data, generate reports for executives, and hopefully decipher interesting trends about your business that you would then go act on. In the early 2000s Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) companies emerged and enabled you to “rent” business applications, rather than buy them, as your employees accessed them through the Internet and their web browsers…
This came with many advantages in total cost of ownership and manageability, but fundamentally most of the first SaaS applications were about workflow and data storage/retrieval just like their on-premise software forefathers. In the last few years we’ve had a “Big Data” explosion and a host of new open source technologies like Hadoop, MapReduce, and Cassandra packaged by a set of new companies that help businesses manage and manipulate their ever expanding mountains of data. Also emerging is a new generation of cloud based analytics companies that make it easy to slice, dice, and visualize big data sets…
Read more from the source @ http://www.forbes.com/sites/ciocentral/2014/04/18/8-ways-to-build-and-use-the-new-breed-of-data-driven-applications/
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