Get Your Assets In The Cloud

You’d have to be living under a rock, a very remote rock, to not have heard something about ‘the cloud.’ If you need proof of the topic’s popularity (at least among marketers in software companies) you only have to look as far as Microsoft’s ‘To the Cloud!’ commercials. Here’s one of the many:

Even as a techy and a marketer of techy stuff to other techies, I am still not entirely sure what Microsoft is aiming to do with these commercials. But one thing is very clear: ‘the cloud’ is here to stay.

According to Gartner, worldwide cloud services (any products, services or solutions that are delivered and consumed in real-time over the internet) revenue grew 21% from 2008 to 2009. By 2013, Gartner predicts that cloud revenue will increase threefold.


Among the many uses of ‘the cloud’ is one I (and my customers) find particularly interesting: Data as a Service (‘DaaS’, in case you like acronyms). For those with a need for live data, the cloud is the perfect place to start.

Cloud data marketplaces like Xignite, and the Microsoft Azure Datamarket have thousands of licensable data sources available for mashing. Their like grocery stores whose shelves are filled with tasty information, prepackaged for easy serving in a mashup, a dashboard, or a spreadsheet. Other catalogs, like those at Data.gov and Recovery.gov, offer similar, more specialized data sets that are just waiting for the right user. These are more akin to the hotdog carts o street corners; just as tasty but with a smaller selection.

So, in a DaaS market you find a service you want and get an immediate access point to that data source. You can find all sorts of things that would compliment and enhance your ERP, CRM, or SCM data: get geo-coded demographic stats, live stock quotes, and even real-time basketball scores. And this type of ‘uber data catalog’ addresses a real sore point in many companies: decision-makers often spend half their time finding the right data before they can even act on it.

And where does the DaaS user go from there? Users can combine marketplace data with their own data, creating something that is greater than the sum of the parts. This can mean better data about an existing problem (imagine adding real-time commodity pricing to production plans for bread or semiconductors) or an opportunity to address entirely new needs (like MyGroceryDeals.com, an information-driven startup recently featured in the Wall Street Journal).

As a company that helps companies work with real-time information, JackBe is certainly no stranger to the cloud. Our customers use our Real-Time Intelligence software, Presto, to connect DaaS sources to their own unique information every day. And we’ve been running Presto on an Amazon EC2 instance for over 2 years, letting our 5,000+ community members use this sandbox as an easy way to jumpstart their work. My favorite App from our community? A consolidated news feed for veterinarians in the cattle industry in New Zealand. (Nope, I am not making this up!)

Recently JackBe worked with the folks at Microsoft to create an exemplar demonstration of a DaaS-driven App. The result is the Perishable Goods Shipping App, using data sources from the Microsoft Azure Datamarket. You can read all about it in Microsoft’s Case Study.

There’s certainly value in Data-as-a-Service. Does it have a place in your organization?