Cloud Computing: Are Big Data Vendors Forgetting History?

Grazed from DataMation. Author: Jeff Vance.

With any new hot trend comes a truckload of missteps, bad ideas and outright failures. I should probably create a template for this sort of article, one in which I could pull out a term like “cloud” or “BYOD” and simply plug in “social media” or “Big Data.” When the trend in question either falls by the wayside or passes into the mainstream, it seems like we all forget the lessons faster than PR firms create new buzzwords.

Of course, vendors within trendy news spaces also tend to think they’re in uncharted waters. But in fact there’s actually plenty of history available to learn from. Cloud concepts have been around at least since the 1960s (check out Douglas Parkhill’s 1966 book, The Challenge of the Computer Utility, if you don’t believe me), but plenty of cloud startups ignored history in favor of buzz. And it’s not like gaining insights from piles of data is some new thing that was previously as rare as detecting neutrinos from deep space. Here are five history lessons we should have already learned, but seem to be doomed to keep repeating:…

1. Small project failures portend the failure of the whole sector.

It wasn’t that long ago that every time a cloud project or company failed, some tech prognosticator would sift through the tea leaves and claim that the cloud concept itself was dead. The same thing is happening with Big Data. According to a recent survey, 55 percent of Big Data projects are never even completed. It’s hard to achieve success if you don’t even finish what you started, yet many mistakenly believe that this means Big Data is bunk…

Read more from the source @ http://www.datamation.com/data-center/are-big-data-vendors-forgetting-history-1.html