In 1965, the director of
research and development (R&D) at Fairchild semiconductor was asked to
predict – what is going to happen in the semiconductor industry over the next
ten years. Inside the article, the director talked about a huge increase in
number of components onto integrated circuits (more than 5 times the current
limit). In 1975, the director extended the prediction to future years and IEEE
formally created a law that states “The number of transistors (and hence the
computing power) doubles every two years”. The director was Gordon Moore and
the law was Moore’s law…40 years later, the law is still driving the
semiconductor industry and in turn affecting the computing industry and the
electronics industry in general. What a revolutionary concept indeed.
Cloud Computing is one other revolutionary idea based on the concept of resource sharing. It refers to having the applications and databases hosted on a system that is shared between many individuals/companies. Contrary to public opinion, this is not a new concept. During the 1970s, when computing power was limited and the resources available to companies was and the resources available were limited, mainframes and servers used to be shared. Then, with the advent of personal computers and systems with higher capacities, companies did not need to share these resources anymore. In today’s world, companies like Amazon and Azure have come up with very inexpensive options to manage the servers and databases of organizations. Companies which were once very reluctant to have their IT systems and databases managed by other companies are not rethinking their stand because of such technological advancements.
The topic in question is the impact of cloud computing and Moore’s law on today’s DW/BI systems. Because of technological advancements, we can now store far more data than what we could 10 years back. Also, computing power has kept pace with the Moore’s law. So we can compute more, analyze more and come up with better insights. But the important thing here is ‘Are the BI tools capable of taking advantage of this increased power?’ The answer is, they are. The tools in existence today have the capability to analyze gigabytes and terabytes of data. The tools that cannot do that will likely be extinct in near future. It is considered a critical disadvantage if the tool cannot handle large volumes of data. A little caveat here, there have been some serious discussions in the industry as to the future applicability of moore’s law. The technologists feel that the industry might be going towards saturation. The number of transistors and in-turn the computing power may not increase at the same pace as it was growing before.
This brings us to the next question… Now that we have such cloud computing options available, what impact does it have on the data warehouses and Business Intelligence tools? One thing is for sure, cloud computing does provide some very useful solutions. Wouldn’t you love it if u can spend less and have your IT systems managed well at the same time?
Let us think about the future
of data warehouse and if it is affected by cloud computing or moore’s law.
Go
as you grow:
One of the biggest concerns of
any organization is how to handle the new data that they just created. It
affects the technology infrastructure of the company and in-turn affects the
business. It is expected that the future enterprises will want the analysis of
data on the fly. They would want to store more data without planning for it in
advance. This brings us to cloud computing. No need to architect, build,
maintain or upgrade your data-warehouse. It will be done for you. Of-course the
privacy and security concerns are inhibitors. Companies and individuals want to
protect their data. For that, we have private clouds and hybrid clouds. We are
slowly seeing more and more companies going for cloud based services because of
the flexibility it provides.
Also, it is expected that
companies might want to just logon to a website or a portal and check the
dashboard. They would be fine with the analysis being done some-place else and
them getting the results wherever they are. This is a direct outcome of cloud
computing.
Cloud
Based BI
Despite such advances in data
storage and retrieval technologies, cloud based BI is still in its nascent
stage. However, it shows a lot of potential. In 2014, Birst and Gooddata gained
more VC funding in 2013. Microstrategy plans to enter the cloud market for BI,
Microsoft Power BI is also planning to unveil cloud based solutions. BI scalability
is going to be of paramount importance to organizations.
Below are some of the reasons for using Cloud BI
Below are some of the reasons for using Cloud BI
Talking about their future goals, the companies said
In Short…
In Short…
I feel that data storage will
get cheaper, cloud technologies will become more prominent and companies will benefit
more from them. There will be hurdles with giving up control of your systems to
a third-party and will hinder companies from moving on completely to cloud. But
there will be a very good number of companies that will benefit from such
advancements in technology – be it for DW/BI or for anything else.
References:
· http://www.tcs.com/SiteCollectionDocuments/White%20Papers/HighTech_Whitepaper_Business_Intelligence_Cloud_0412-1.pdf
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