Over the past decade, consumer-facing web giants such as Google and Facebook have invested heavily in user data — storing it, analyzing it, and using the insights revealed to rapidly iterate on products. These companies recognized early that user data is a treasure trove, and devoted significant in-house resources to reap its value. In this way, increasingly data-driven and data-dependent enterprises are playing catch-up. In a post at GigaOm, Pivotal Initiative leader Paul Maritz articulates his vision for “the consumer-grade enterprise,” taking its cues not from the offerings of traditional enterprise vendors, but instead from the likes of Google, Facebook, and Amazon.
The factors driving this shift, Maritz explains, include the ascent of the cloud and the profusion of data, which will only increase in years ahead as consumers adopt “The Internet of Things” technologies. As the amount of data increases, enterprises will not only need to store and analyze it, but transform it into actionable insight at an ever-faster speed. He writes:
Enterprise companies will need ways to store and analyze massive amounts of data cost-effectively, ingest huge numbers of events in real time, reason over the data and events, and react in real time. Teams will need to be able to develop rapidly the new solutions that exploit these underlying capabilities. The need for these capabilities can be seen across a wider set of industries — from industrial control to telecommunications to retail, and even to modern agriculture.
To address these challenges, Maritz calls for a new cloud-enabled platform that is free from vendor lock-in, capable of handling massive amounts of data, which delivers insights in real time. Read more about Maritz’s vision at GigaOm.
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