Why Do Analytically Driven Companies Adopt the Cloud?

It seems like a pretty straight forward question and more often than not most people assume the answer is centric to the economics of cloud. From the very beginning cloud has had a reputation for being a cheaper alternative to traditional on-premises solutions. It’s not an absolute truth in every implementation but cloud can often deliver an economic upside in comparison to on-premises solutions. Cloud helps companies avoid the risky capital investment often necessary with IT projects.

I often blog as the Chief Research Officer for Dell Software - Read this entire post on Dell.com

Driving Innovation with a Cloud First Culture

Adopting new technologies that best fit your company’s business challenges can be a difficult process. Separating the marketing speak from true business value causes many firms to take a wait and see attitude towards cutting edge solutions creating innovation gaps and hindering competitive advantage...

I often blog as the Chief Research Officer for Dell Software - Read this entire post on Dell.com

Portability in a Hybrid Data Ecosystem

Adoption of the Hybrid Data Ecosystem continues to grow. Vendors are working to deliver highly integrated ecosystems with platforms that provide the user an agile and flexible array of solutions to address today's complex and demanding workloads. The interesting part of the story is the division in how they approach this opportunity. Some vendors are building fully featured "Walled Garden" style solutions with all parts dependent upon one another. Its a nice strategy that may lead to better inetegration but you can't really get away from it once you are engaged. This type of lock-in to technology and infrastruture can be dangerous and in the long run very expensive for the consumer.

Others (only a few) are focusing on highly integrated environments that match the competition feature for feature but at the same time allow for portability. Pivotal is a company working to bring its clients portability with cloud infrastructure. A common fear of cloud adaptors is being locked into one infrastructure provider for the duration of their projects or forever. If you utilize Pivotal on its Cloud Foundry platform you have the ability to move from AWS to Rackspace if need be providing a level of flexibility that most companies would prefer over time. This strategy is also smart for companies that suspect a Cloud based program may migrate back behind the firewall at some point. Being locked-in to a Cloud provider will make this an impossible change or at the least terribly expensive.

So this begs the question, what's better? Walled gardens or portable infrastructure. The answer seems obvious to me but I'm interested to hear from you on this topic.

Cloud Based API Management - IronCloud

StrikeIron has overhauled its IronCloud solution and relaunched it this week. The solution is a fully hosted Cloud API Management platform. The solution had previously only been available to StrikeIron clients and partners is now open to any company seeking a better smarter way to manage their API based offerings. StrikeIron earned its stripes in this space by hosting its own API's for contact record validation and verification, mobile messaging and data enrichment. StrikeIron developed enterprise class security and infrastructure to host and deliver its service and has been in the API space for over 10 years.

IronCloud provides a simple yet powerful platform designed for business users and IT who are responsible for managing and delivering API powered assets. As enterprise application and data requirements evolve and become more diverse. API's are playing a significant roll in adding agility and flexibility to enterprise environments. Being able to leverage API's through common interfaces that are simple and manageable will be a key component of any smart business strategy. 

StrikeIron solutions are pre-integrated into Eloqua, Informatica, Oracle CRM On-Demand, Marketo and more.

Amazon Kinesis Streaming Data in the Cloud

Amazon AWS rolled out its newest Cloud based solution today. Kinesis is Amazon's answer to Streaming Data challenges. The solution is aimed at use cases in the areas of Accelerated Log/Data Feed Ingest-Tranform-Load, Continual Metrics / KPI Extraction, Near real-time Data Analytics and Complex Event Processing (CEP). Kinesis leverages Amazon's investments in S3, DynamoDB and Redshift so customers can aggregate and store the data, extract information from the data as its in flight and apply business anlytics to the information.

The system is designed to meet needs for low end-to-end latency from data ingest to processing, high scalability, data durablity via replication, system elasticity and openess to support application developers who will integrate it with operational workflows. The system is a highly managed service freeing users to focus on thier businees instead of tech.

Getting data into the system is fairly straight forward using the Amazon PUT function, each update is limited to 50kb in size. Assuming standard enterprise bandwidth and fast souce application speeds Kinesis can ingest the information in under a second. Data repllication takes about the same time and in the end Kinesis can make data available within 7 seconds. This isn't how I would define real-time streaming but for many applications its a huge advantage over traditional batch and will often match the speed of business.

As you would expect Amazon has priced the solution as a pay-as-you-go service. You will need to provision 1 shard for every 1000 transaction per second (TPS) you are processing for each 1MB/sec you ingest the cost is $0.015 the same is true for egress of data at 2MB/sec. Additional costs of $0.28 per 1,000,000 PUT transactions will also apply.

I like this offer it fits well between sub-second real-time streaming and batch. Most companies would be challenged to find processes that demand higher speeds that what Kinesis offers so I suspect it will fill a void for many of their clients. Early adopter for Kinesis have come from the Financial services and digital advertising sectors both industries are leaders in real-time adoption.

The product is still in limited BETA so you will have to apply to give it a try.