BI for the Cloud is a Game-Changer

David Linthicum's latest post on Cloud BI is spot on -- not only for the reason he covered, but also for one he did not.

First off, BI in the Cloud is going to be a big deal. The benefits of the elastic Cloud and low barriers to entry will make BI a no-brainer for businesses.  And here's the thing, the business needs intelligence like never before. The amount of data being created today is borderline ridiculous and is not slowing.

A quick side story -- a former colleague of mine recently joined a large online retailer to run a line of business. When I asked him how it was going, his response was that he was struggling with the lack of data. Even though this was a digital company, they had separate systems that they needed to gather data from and correlate in order to try and determine their sales effectiveness.  It was so much manual work that they were going to have to hire someone full-time just to stitch these reports together.  Data was the lifeblood of his business, and without it he was managing in the dark.  When I asked why they didn't have a central reporting system, his answer was, "the project had been canceled several times due to the high cost."

BI in the Cloud is going to happen since there is a live or die need for the business. We can take Dave's thought one step further, though -- BI for the Cloud is also a game-definer.

If you are in the business of running a Cloud, you are in the business of delivering services. This may be external, internal, or both. Either way, it is now your business to run your infrastructure as a business so you need the right data at the right time to make decisions.  You can't be spending time trying to stitch together data from disparate systems to try to understand what's happening in your Cloud.

Line managers need data to understand how their area is performing and where they need to make adjustments. Cloud consumers need data to see how their services and applications are performing. Directors need data across all the areas in order to monitor utilization and capacity trends.

Cloud operations must have have complete visibility into all the performance, events, capacity, and utilization of their infrastructure if they want to plan for what's next. Having intelligence about your Cloud datacenter will separate those who know how the business is running from those that hope they do.

Learn more how Zenoss is providing datacenter intelligence into your Cloud operations.

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