Cloud computing brings big data to the masses

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Beth Pariseau.

As cloud computing evolves, one particular use for it is beginning to stand out: big data. What exactly big data means and how it fits into the cloud conversation, however, are questions not easily answered. Medio Systems Inc., founded in 2004 as an application service provider (ASP), has recently reinvented itself as a cloud-hosted provider of big data analytics, with a focus on mobile platforms. The company is also marketing its inGenius Software as a Service, traditionally aimed at enterprise customers such as T-Mobile, Verizon, Disney and CBS, at small- and medium-size businesses (SMBs).

Brian Lent, co-founder and chief technology officer of Medio, and Ivan Sucharski, Medio’s data strategist, spoke about big data, the evolution of cloud computing and how the two trends affect each other…

How would you define big data for people who aren’t all that familiar?

Brian Lent: I would define it as data on [such] a scale that you can’t have a single department effectively manage it. Once you turn data into an operational process where you say, ‘The data is going to drive our commerce engine and our recommendations and our churn modeling and our financial forecast,’ now it becomes a different kind of asset, where you need to have the analytics passage sitting next to data, collocated because of the volume and the transfer. Once data is seen as a profit center, and hence there’s a utility, then I think it moves more into the big data realm…

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