Moore's law, proposed by Gordon Moore states that the number of transistors per square inch on every integrated circuit doubles every year. In simple terms, it means the the processing and storage capability of computational machines will double every year. Surprisingly, this law still holds true even after 50 years.
One such example is Cloud computing. Cloud computing involves deploying groups of remote servers and software networks that allow centralized data storage and online access to computer services or resources. As Steve Jobs said. "I don’t need a hard disk in my computer if I can get to the server faster… carrying around these non-connected computers is byzantine by comparison." And I agree with this great man. Cloud Computing certainly has a huge impact on data-driven decision making or Business Intelligence. At a very high level Cloud BI benefits IT through faster deployment of solutions, more flexible capacity, faster and less expensive exploration of new technologies, as well as reduced capital, licensing, and maintenance costs.Let us look at a few examples of how true this is:
Aptaria(A sales force and cloud integration company) helps Nutricia
Nutricia, a nutrition products company leveraged Salesforce across their enterprise. Typically Salesforce collects a lot of data but the sales representatives at Nutricia were not making any use of this data. Aptaria introduced and recommended GoodData to Nutricia as a reporting and business intelligence (BI) solution.With the help of GoodData, Nutricia became a data-driven company and the sales representatives were able to perform following functions:
- Receive real-time reports on a daily basis
- Have reports that are "fun and easy to use" – no intimidation factor
- Tweak reports easily against their business plans when their numbers change
- Create new reports to answer "what and how" questions
Condé Nast, a global media company, wanted better insight into consumer behavior to improve the performance of its 20 industry-leading print and digital media brands. For better efficiency and business intelligence (BI), the company implemented a solution based on Power BI for Office 365.
Through highly visual, interactive features such as graphs and pie charts, the reports provide immediate insight into factors such as consumer behavior, market share, competitors, and web traffic across PC browsers, tablets, and mobile devices. Editorial teams and marketers can quickly drill down into more detail.
Since, all the data was on cloud, performing analytics and generating reports is now possible for everyone at Conde Nast. They have seen exceptional results in terms of improved efficiency of the Marketing and Analytics team.
Conclusion
Data will go on increasing and so will the processing and storage capabilities. Business Intelligence will prove quite important to make sense of this large amount of data. But, organizations shouldn't become too data driven that human intelligence loses its significance in decision making. Not being philosophical here, but just saying!
References
http://www.aptaria.com/industries/healthcare/nutricia-bi.html
https://customers.microsoft.com/Pages/CustomerStory.aspx?recid=12466
Wikipedia
http://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/white-papers/extending-enterprise-business-intelligence-and-big-data-to-the-cloud-paper.pdf
