Cloud analytics is hot. Gartner's top two strategic technologies for the enterprise in 2010 are cloud computing and advanced analytics. In their words "Technologies you can't afford to ignore".
Venture capitalist Ann Winblad, in a recent video, points out that the coming era of realtime cloud analytics will have a revolutionary impact on the enterprise, creating a radically new "innovation palette" for businesses of all kinds.
Business analytics is, of course, a major established sector of the IT industry, but it's one that's ripe for disruption. Twenty years of SQL/OLAP analytics have created a $25 Billion market, but the impact of SQL/OLAP analytics on the enterprise has been far less impressive than many had hoped.
Only a relatively small fraction (5%-10%) of those grappling with information overload from explosively growing enterprise data sources actually use SQL/OLAP analytics. Instead, the vast majority are bypassing relational databases, SQL, and in many cases bypassing the IT department altogether. What are they using? Excel, a product that despite some shortcomings, has become the world's #1 business tool for analytics with over 40 Million power users, and up to 400 Million users in total.
With business, web, financial and government data all growing exponentially, enterprise users urgently require a completely new generation of analytics products and services that go far beyond SQL/OLAP in addressing today's challenges, and that can impact all areas of the enterprise. And they're willing to pay for powerful new solutions in this area! Analytics is now the highest priority for new IT spending within the enterprise.
In the next article I'll provide a "Cloud Analytics Checklist" to help clarify the requirements for next-generation post-SQL/OLAP enterprise analytics.
About Bill McColl Bill McColl is Founder and CEO, Cloudscale Inc. - which is developing a massively parallel cloud-based platform for continuous real-time intelligence on live data streams.
In 2006, he left Oxford University Computing Laboratory where for over twenty years he had been head of research in parallel computing and scalable systems. At the time of his departure, he was Professor of Computer Science and Chairman of the Faculty of Computer Science. McColl has published and lectured extensively on the design, analysis and implementation of massively parallel algorithms and systems.
He established and led Oxford Parallel, a major center for research on industrial and business applications of parallel computing at the university. He was also founder and CEO of Sychron Inc., a Silicon Valley VC-backed software company developing massively parallel system software for datacenter and desktop virtualization. Cloudscale Inc.is his second Silicon Valley company.
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