The Next Big Thing (the even looonger End of the Cloud)

With the Pioneers still in the back of my mind, with all the startups’ ideas presented there, with predictions of like 40 billion connected “things” by 2020 (Source: Gartner) and all those many buzzwords around in these areas I am even more convinced that “The Cloud” as a discussable topic – as a matter that needs any kind of consideration whatsoever – is really at its end.

In case you read the writeup of one of my keynotes, you may recall the red line through it which stated a mere end to the early concepts of Cloud Computing as those concepts have so much matured and so deeply entered businesses and the internet as such, that we can securely claim Cloud to be ubiquitous: It is just there. Just as the Internet has been for years now.

So, what’s next? BigData? Social Revolution? Mobile Everywhere? All of that and any combination?

Here comes a series of posts discussing these topics and beyond. It will offer some clarifying definitions and delineations.

The first parts will cover what’s to expect by the bond of data and analytics, mobility and social media. In the second half it will discuss the huge transformation challenges involved with the digitalization of business. The conclusive part is about how IT has to change in order to support businesses rightly in these challenging and ever-changing times.

So let’s begin with

The Nexus of Forces

I like this paradigm that was originally postulated by Gartner some time ago (I read it first in the “Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies 2014”). It describes the bonding of Cloud Computing with BigData, Social and Mobile.

Personally – unsurprisingly – I would disagree with Gartner to see “Cloud” as one of the 4 forces; rather my claim would be that Cloud Computing is the underlying basis to everything else. Why? Because any of those ecosystems which are to support the other 3 forces (mobile, social, data) builds inherently along the 5 essential characteristics of Cloud which still define whether a particular service is within or out of the definition:

• On demand self-service: make things available when they’re needed
• Broad network access: ensure delivery of the service through ubiquitous networking on high bandwidth
• Resource pooling: Manage resources consumed by the service efficiently for sharing between service tenants
• Rapid elasticity: Enable the service to scale up and down based on the demand of consumers
• Measured: Offer utmost transparency about what service consumers have been using over time match it clearly and transparently with what they’re charged.

Hence, when now continuing to discuss the Nexus of Forces, I will keep it with the three of them and will not query The Cloud’s role in it (sic! “It’s the End of the Cloud as we know it” ;))

{No. 2 of this series discusses definition and challenges related to data and analytics}

Update: feature image added (found at http://forcelinkpr.net/?p=9612)