When Cloud Meets Big Data

Cloud computing and big data, both are transforming organizations across diverse industries. But the real importance lies in the cloud convergence with big data. As outsourcing/IT services are demanding the analytics delivery of services, innovations comes into play. BPO has shifted towards more 'insight', providers adding analytics tools, buildings standards platform, and also collaborating social media-consumerization with big data power.

Transformation

Venkat N Rajan, vice president and GM, analytics, Symphony Teleca remains confident on the question of business transformation on the account of cloud-big data convergence. Venkat says, the convergence of big data and cloud provides benefits to businesses as cost savings, ease of management, and unrivaled flexibility. While harnessing big data can provide organizations with valuable insights, they are often faced by the challenge of limited storage and computing power available on premise. Cloud addresses this challenge by providing unlimited storage and access to virtually any place and this scalability is the prime need of today's business. In the aftermath of economic downturn, not only companies are eyeing cost reduction, they are also in search of most innovative methods those cans translate the much-said amalgamation of tech-trends such as cloud, big data, consumerization, and SoLoMo.

While harnessing big data generate value across industries & sectors, it has a great potential in healthcare, public services, retail, and manufacturing. Big data analytics provides a method to forecast the market mood. It provides the much needed consumer an market analytics that remains vital for any business. Venkat says that analytics when turned into meaningful insights, can draw the whole picture of business landscape with higher color of returns and consumer satisfaction. Innovation is the demand for business, companies not only search for innovative ways they also look for solutions those can enhance their service delivery methods.

Meeting the Demands

Enterprise IT should be geared towards coping with data volume, velocity, and variety to not only prevent storage costs from getting out of control but, more importantly, get better insights faster. Venkat says that convergence of cloud computing with big data/analytics presents a major opportunity for outsourcing companies. He adds, not only the traditional delivery of services will be fast and infrastructure free, it will boost up the quality of the services delivered. Cloud-analytics enables BPO providers to extract, analyze, and forecast business insights from the vast trove of transactional and behavioral data generated over span of time and by process that re-outsourced. As the providers will be well aware of the buyer's behavior and market data, they can easily draft their services to meet the market and buyer demand.

Analytics will be used by almost each verticals as the industry is focusing on more value added outcome of the services. With economic condition being almost unpredictable, the pressure will shift on the shoulders of the service providers. With adoption of cloud and analytics, buyers, no longer remain concerned about the infrastructure and delivery mechanism. The buyer's concern has transformed from price, cost cutting to value added and innovational approach of delivery.

SMB Cloud Adoption

Commenting on the subject of SMB-cloud adoption, Vish Sivaswamy, head, global practices, Anthelio Business Technologies believes, almost every large enterprise is using the cloud, SMBs are definitely behind. I think the reason is lack of awareness. There is a change though in the last one year - and we have seen twice the number of SMB customers inquiring and moving to leverage the cloud in 2011. Although a great opportunity, it will be a challenge to change the mindset of small sized enterprises. Security is certainly a factor and again attributable to lack of awareness. A lot depends on the creation of awareness and the right value proposition.

The Indian cloud market will grow. Consumers will use enterprise and mobile applications more than the desk/laptops in the days to come. Hence security will be and rightly so should be a concern. Awareness is gradually increasing and enterprises that have not yet moved into the cloud space are considering its potential advantages. SMBs have to be educated that they can invest lesser and acquire better security processes through cloud than having their own infrastructure to meet the consumer demand and at the same time be secure.

Conclusion

Increasingly, cloud technology is providing the competitive edge to SMB/SMEs which they need to achieve through innovation, enabling them to meet customer's demand and can stand together in comparison to any large corporate. SMBs can use the power of analytics to identify and seize opportunities to improve organizations' business outcome. The potential of the providers are being measured on their ability to deliver 'end-to-end approach' based on valued added outcome of the outsourcing contracts. Outsourcing companies can offer their clients value added services in the area of big data analytics without heavy investments on the part of clients in specialized hardware and software as was the case with traditional data analytics. This is resonated by the fact, which reveals that cloud computing and data analytics are two technology areas currently offering businesses the opportunity to get more out of ITES. While in the past, a business would have to buy licenses and install heavy-duty business applications as part of a BPO/ITES deal, today they can sign up to cloud based services and easily scale up and down the number of users.