“Jones, we need an RDBMS strategy implemented immediately!! Oh, and, what’s an RDBMS?”
Thus read the caption to a New Yorker cartoon many years ago, in which a CEO was berating a subordinate.
The same cartoon could run today, with the words “Cloud Computing,” “Big Data,” or “SDN.” All have emerged on the radar screens of every enterprise. By every enterprise, I mean every enterprise.
Certainly, many cloud vendors have targeted the magical SMB market – AWS, for example, is not just for large customers such as Netflix, but for mom and pop and you and me as well. My own verification of this came as I talked to small businesspeople on Main Street USA and at county fairs in Illinois this past summer.
Truly – you might be surprised at how seriously a tacos-and-cotton-candy vendor was studying cloud computing as a way to run his business better. This guy and his wife spend six months lounging around in Florida from the profits they earn every year on their circuit, and he’s well worth listening to.
Furthermore, I now find myself involved with a start-up that is delivering systems-control software through the cloud to custom-built enterprise hardware. Cloud computing is at the center of our conversations, strategy, and execution.
We anticipate collecting terabytes of information annually as well – albeit much of it in pictures and video – but which nevertheless will need to be correlated, analyzed, and acted upon. So Big Data, as we define it, is in the picture.
Which brings me to SDN. A nascent term, really, for most people, and for our start-up. I have a concern that Oracle might “SDN-wash” things this year, rendering the term less useful. I also wonder if this is a technological approach and strategy that’s more important to our cloud vendors than it is to us.
That said, our start-up aims to cover the US, then the world, in a few highly targeted vertical markets, in a way that may command us to have a universal way to deploy relatively vast resources yet make things very easy to manage for our users.
So, now, I become a true student of SDN, as it matters not only to my life as a writer, but also as a start-up guy with skin in the game. And I don’t have a Jones to berate; I need to learn all this on my own.
