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Data … as a Service

March 18, 2008

It seems that IT is in a permanent state of flux - we just left this old technology/ methodology/ philosophy, currently we are jazzed about this new way of doing things - most likely we are in the middle of an implementation of the new cool thing… And we are seeing on the horizon even better things!  However, there is one thing in common - things are getting better, faster and cheaper. The economy is shaped by competition and the competition is fierce - We need to carve out opportunity before our competition does?

So, I am wondering why we still continue to invest in, maintain and support email. With all the ‘email as a service’ models out there, it seems that we are set to outsource this function to the specialists. Personally, I have a Gmail account. Why not ride on Google’s checkbook for a bit. Sure, there are trade offs and we need to look at them. As time goes by, ROI will drive us the other way.

While we are at it, when are we going to chuck our expensive office products for free open source products. Again, at some point, we would do well to jump in and capitalize on this opportunity. I can throw some open source development tools and databases out there while I am at it. But, my real point is data….data as a service.

I was chatting with John Wheeler, a senior data architect at The Kroger Co. recently and we thought this through. Yeah, of course we are putting our livelihood at risk, but it’s going to come down to this sooner or later. The magic is in the model. Canonical models form the foundation of the business. They must both support the business now and be able to take us where we need to go. We have really smart people doing really great things here. That’s not the commodity. What is the commodity is taking this conceptual work and generating the physical environment, optimizing it and maintaining it - Yawn!

Why not put our energies into the important things and just throw that model over the wall and have Google implement it. Competition will deliver capability. Think about it - we focus at the enterprise level on the business, providing business value, looking at risks and adjusting to the competition. While we are delivering solutions, we indicate what is or should be master data, how it relates to our business. We trigger the capturing of meta data and render the delivery method - then throw it over the wall. Meanwhile, the data as a service folks get better and better at their offerings and we are off to think about better things!

Just thinking out loud….DaaS!

~ Scott Felten

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Written by Scott Felten · Filed Under Information Technology 

Comments

One Response to “Data … as a Service”

  1. Scott Felten on March 31st, 2008 3:15 pm

    So, I am commenting on my own post…does that break any rules? If you want to avoid the costs of hosting your own ms exchange server, but really like MS Outlook - let Google handle the back end and simply connect via Outlook.

    Cemaphore (http://www.cemaphore.com/mailshadow_g.php) just announced a product to make this a reality; MailShadowG will synchronize the two.

    As I was saying in my post; if this fit is right for you, its fast and free! I am sure this will bring about many heated debates…

    Speed+Convenience+Free VS. $afety and $ecurity

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