Kevin Jordan
The glass ceiling for IT has been broken when it comes to cloud. Unlike before, companies now have the ability to cut out the hardware, and even the software if they choose to, with a cloud solution that reduces costs and shortens time to market. Companies with options can become more agile to better serve their customers. The cloud is the starting point to breaking IT’s reliance on the old ways of doing business.
Companies often get so overwhelmed with the idea of cloud and integration that completing either seems like victory enough . However, with seamless integration and a cloud that comes along with it, companies can go well beyond deployment to find real business value.
Not All Clouds are the Same
As popular as cloud is for businesses, and as important as it is to innovation, cloud projects are often viewed as daunting because of time and cost. These are the two factors that can torpedo any business venture. Companies often think short term when it comes to their systems, so they fail to recognize the necessity of integration and cloud’s ever-increasing value.
Not one cloud looks the same as another and not every company is at the same stage of their cloud deployment cycle. This kind of variation demands something flexible. Companies need the freedom to test different ideas before deployment and the flexibility of a cloud solution (that does not trap a company into a vendor) reveals how companies can make the most of their investments.
There are some things a business can get away without doing and still be successful. And then there are some that used to be acceptable to overlook and will never be again, like mobility. Mobile phones and tablets are starting to take the place of everything we used to use both as consumer and employees. Smartphone cameras are replacing actual cameras and video cameras; tablets are replacing paper books, newspapers, and magazines. Mobility has even begun transforming experiences like shopping and watching a movie.
In commercials, on blogs, and on the Internet, mobile companies advertise to get their phones in customers’ hands. And it’s working. Customers become strongly attached to their chosen brand of mobile phone, almost to the point of fighting to prove their choice is the best. From the time we wake up to the time we go to bed, our lives revolve around the little devices that do much more than make a phone call. We are attached to our phones and willing to defend them.
Only a decade ago, India and China fully opened their societies to the West. Instead of telephone poles and landlines, Asian companies met 21st-century challenges head-on by skipping investing in outdated infrastructure for moving directly to smart phones and deploying mobile apps. A parallel can be drawn with the healthcare industry. Let’s leapfrog to 21st-century information technology solutions and stop trying to solve today’s problems with yesterday’s outdated technology.
If your company purports to want to innovate and become a market leader, why do they seem satisfied with an average data solution? What’s even worse, businesses unwillingly aspire to be just average while spouting off to employees and customers they are anything but. Companies with average IT solutions will always produce average results and never go from average or good to great.
By now, we all understand the enormous scale of big data and that enterprises have indeed begun to store, collect, and analyze historical data for intelligent action. This basic minimum is not enough, nor will it ever be, as big data continues to wildly increase. The few companies who actually use big data to continuously improve, spot opportunities, and mitigate risks, all in real time, are soaring past those who let data collect dust in databases, under the false impression that collecting the data is enough.
People do not often think of data points as having dire consequences, but it could mean the life and death of a business. In every realm of business and sector of life from politics, economics, society, the environment, to technology, there are big data complications. Without the blend of analytics and integration solutions, there are growing risks of security threats, need for efficiency and cost reductions, and a desire for more collaboration. Big data is not just big because companies and organizations collect large volumes of it, but also because it has real and lasting implications on everyone.
With all the talk about how big data should be used, what for, and why, rarely do we hear about who uses “it.” All the recent buzz around big data is not because data has all of a sudden become more valuable, it’s that people are now realizing and discussing how to use new technologies and architectures to derive value from these large data sets.
Fans want to support their teams regardless of where they are, or where their teams are playing. No matter if the person is tailgating, watching a game at home, or in the stands cheering the team on, the fan is there in the moment. Especially today, where everything is mobile and people can access information at any time, from any place, fans want the up-to-date information on their teams as it is happening. The critical point of this is that in today’s day and age, the fan is mobile and always on the go. This means the team – the company – has to 
