Coming To A Place Near You: A Private Cloud Spiked With Big Data

Yesterday, I moderated a couple of panels at the Big Data Cloud event. I have been a keynote speaker, panelist, moderator, and participant for many conferences in the last few years. It has always been a pleasure to see the cloud and big data becoming more and more mainstream. Here are my quick observations and insights from the event:

Private cloud getting momentum: As a public cloud proponent I thought I would never have to write this. But lately I have seen more and more interest in private cloud; new start-ups, established cloud vendors, and large legacy vendors are designing private or hybrid cloud solutions. Vendors have recognized that prospects and customers have started to take cloud very seriously but they still have the same concerns what they had few years back: security, moving data to public cloud, and giving up control. I am not interested in the private/public debate (though I do love to mess with fellow clouderati on Twitter on this topic). My take on this trend is that the vendors should do whatever it takes to move the organizations to the cloud, private or public. Once companies dip their toes, they themselves will realize what's good for them.

Big Data as a serious category: A few days back, I blogged about big data going mainstream. Coming out from this event, it felt like, today Big Data is where cloud was a couple of years back. When I asked people a few years back "What's Hadoop?" They would reply "Huh?" Now, everyone wants to know more about Hadoop, Hive, HBase, S4, Oozie, Pig, Cassandra, and other big data frameworks. They're interested in analyzing and comparing available solutions. They're asking all the right questions. The VC investment in this category has been record high. Hadoop World was a sold out event this year with 1500 participants. Milind Bhandarkar, Chief Architect with Greenplum Labs, mentioned that in 2008, during the first Hadoop summit, they had to coax people to come to the summit. The people who willingly came to the summit either worked for Yahoo or Facebook. We have come a long way and there's a long way to go but this is a rock solid category. As the first set of big data infrastructure companies settle in we will see people building killer applications and PaaS solutions specifically designed to leverage big data. It is encouraging to see more and more companies and venture capitalists recognizing that the data is worth a lot more if they have the right tools and right people — the data scientists — to do something interesting with it. For example, Greylock partners have hired DJ Patil as a "data scientist in residence" to help them with evaluating their opportunities and advising their portfolio companies on big data strategies.

Rise in popularity of open source frameworks: If you follow the history of open source you'll realize that when a proprietary way of doing things become popular, commercial vendors pose a lock-in threat, and things don't work as expected, developers get frustrated and start to work on filling that gap by building open source technology. Linux started that way and so were many other open source projects. This is why I am excited to see OpenStack gaining rapid momentum. It's slowly becoming a de-facto standard to build a commercial cloud solutions. I also like Cloud Foundry since many companies that I know of, ISVs and large IT shops, won't use a public PaaS. They would prefer to launch their own PaaS solution in the cloud. Without an open source solution, it does become a big challenge.

Emergent Cloud Computing Business Models

The last year I wrote quite a few posts on the business models around SaaS and cloud computing including SaaS 2.0 , disruptive early stage cloud computing start-ups , and branding on the cloud . This year people have started asking me – well, we have seen PaaS, IaaS, and SaaS but what do you think are some of the emergent cloud computing business models that are likely to go mainstream in coming years. I spent some time thinking about it and here they are: Computing arbitrage: I have seen quite a few impressive business models around broadband bandwidth arbitrage where companies such as broadband.com buys bandwidth at Costco-style wholesale rate and resells it to the companies to meet their specific needs. PeekFon solved the problem of expensive roaming for the consumers in Eurpoe by buying data bandwidth in bulk and slice-it-and-dice-it to sell it to the customers. They could negotiate with the operators to buy data bandwidth in bulk because they made a conscious decision not to st...

Focus On Your Customers And Not Competitors

A lorry is a symbol of Indian logistics and the person who is posing against it is about to rethink infrastructure and logistics in India. Jeff Bezos is enjoying his trip to India charting Amazon’s growth plan where competitors like Flipkart have been aggressively growing and have satisfied customer base. This is not the first time Bezos has been to India and he seems to understand Indian market far better than many CEOs of American companies. His interview with a leading Indian publication didn’t get much attention in the US where he discusses Amazon’s growth strategy in India. When asked whether he is in panic mode: For 19 years we have succeeded by staying heads down, focused on our customers. For better or for worse, we spend very little time looking at our competitors. It is better to stay focused on customers as they are the ones paying for your services. Competitors are never going to give you any money. I always believe in focusing on customers, especially on their latent unme...

Purple Squirrels

It is fashionable to talk about talent shortage in the silicon valley. People whine about how hard it is to find and hire the "right" candidates. What no one wants to talk about is how the hiring process is completely broken. I need to fill headcount: This is a line that you hear a lot at large companies. Managers want to hire just because they are entitled to hire with a "hire or lose headcount" clause. Managers spend more time worrying about losing headcount and less time finding the right people the right way. Chasing a mythical candidate: Managers like to chase purple squirrels . They have outrageous expectations and are far removed from reality of talent market. Managers are also unclear on exactly what kind of people they are looking to hire. Bizarre interview practices: "How many golf balls can fit in a school bus?" or "can you write code with right hand while drawing a tree with left hand?" We all have our favorite bizarre interview st...

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