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This weeks round up spans almost everything - from IoT platforms, cloud, databases, analytics, and even user interface design - kinda....
- Salesforce IoT Cloud puts machine-generated data in the hands of business users. These days it seems, if you have a large data repository in the cloud, you are re-positioning as an IoT platform. Salesforce started re-positioning from a cloud CRM solution to a cloud application building platform 2-3 years ago. This latest move seeks to incorporate IoT data (and by extension Industrial IoT data) into that wealth of CRM data. I think we will see this more and more moving ahead. The gravity exerted by massive data volumes in cloud applications will increasingly suck in more data, and more applications, like a black hole.
- What you missed in Cloud: The price wars heat up. Everybody's favorite bookshop took the axe to the cost of cloud storage once more. Amazon's cost for long-term storage is now less than one cent per gigabyte per month. The company has apparently cut the price of cloud services over 40 times in 8 years. Amazon wants your data. Over the next couple of years, CIO's are going to come under increasing pressure to outsource low-value grunt work to the cloud. This will allow corporate IT staff to focus on more strategic problems - such as ensuring that IT innovation aligns with business innovation. Which you could say amounts to better aligning IT resources with the Industrial Internet of Things.
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Why DBaaS Will Be The Next Big Thing In Database Management. As a perfect follow-up to the story above, instead of raw storage in the cloud, why not try a database in the cloud...? If you want to play here, the four major cloud providers will all provide you with Database-as-a-Service. In most cases, several different flavors of database to best meet your specific needs.
- Big data projects gaining steam, but not due to the CIO. An encouraging little story this one...Apparently big data projects - and analytics projects in general - are increasingly being driven by business management. This is exactly how it should be. Big data initiatives driven by the IT department are a very bad idea. A "build it and they will come" approach is probably the surest way to get analytics a bad name in any corporation. Always better for the IT team to promote and advocate for analytics amongst business management than to try and drive it directly.
- Red alert - AA App deciphers warning light hieroglyphs. A bit left-field this one, but bear with me...The AA is the UK's triple A if you will - a national car breakdown service. Apparently the AA now gets 17,000 call-outs a month from drivers who are befuddled by the user interface of their cars. They can't understand what dashboard warning lights are trying to tell them. I can see this problem looming large for industrial applications and analytics as the Industrial IoT picks up speed. As we bring more data, from more diverse sources into analytics, we will have to re-double our efforts to make sure that operators and managers can quickly assimilate and understand what they are looking at.