We live in a time when you can pick up a tiny computer, ask it a question out loud and have a satisfactory answer provided in a matter of seconds. It's amazing if you stop to think about it.
Voice-recognizing digital personal assistants have become commonplace. One such assistant is among the most important new features unveiled in Apple's latest smartphone. Called Siri, it recognizes natural language questions and accesses a plethora of web services to provide an answer. Android-based phone users (like yours truly), on the other hand, have enjoyed voice recognition to navigate, search or compose messages since summer of last year.
Of course, the answers to the questions we ask - whether verbally or through text input - usually do not reside in the bits and bytes contained in our smartphones, tablets or PCs. They sit somewhere out on the other end of a network connection, in "the cloud" - usually stored at a data centre.
However, whether residing in publicly available data sources or behind private firewalls, the total amount of data accumulation taking place is staggering. Truly, we are living in the "information age."
According to technology market research firm IDC, more than 1.2 sextillion bytes of digital data were created and stored between the beginning of the "information age" and the end of 2010 - a number so large that it is as incomprehensible as the US debt. The amount of data has grown ninefold over the past five years alone.
However, like the national debt, the numbers show no signs of slowing down. IDC forecasts another 650% growth in total data by 2015. I'll try to put the 2015 data into a little imaginary perspective. By my reckoning, if we stored it all as CD-ROM disks, we could build more than 33 stacks extending all the way out to the moon.
There are also new twists emerging in the data storage market. Earlier, I alluded to cloud computing - the delivery of computing as an online service, rather than a product - which has entered an explosive growth phase as well. Apple's new voice recognition software wasn't the only big news at the iPhone unveiling. Another major Apple initiative is iCloud, where users can store everything from pictures to videos to music all online.
Google, on the other hand, has delinked applications from end-user devices and placed them in "the cloud" instead. Google Apps allows users to access their documents and work on them regardless of whether they are using a traditional PC or a mobile device. Microsoft's Office suite also includes locationless, Internet-centric functionality. Businesses are increasingly looking to cloud computing companies for the purchase of software and infrastructure as a service, instead of doing it themselves.
Clearly, innovative technology companies addressing the needs of the data storage market will benefit from these accelerating trends.
Regards,
Ray Blanco
for The Daily Reckoning Australia
Ray Blanco is the co-editor of US-based newsletter Technology Profits Confidential.
This article originally appeared in The Daily Reckoning USA.
From the Archives...
An Ice Age For Australian House Prices
2012-02-24 - Greg Canavan
"Supranational" Investing
2012-02-23 - Addison Wiggin
Economic Recovery Without Pain
2012-02-22 - Bill Bonner
What the Greek Debt Crisis is Really About
2012-02-21 - Dan Denning
Greek Default Therapy
2012-02-20 - Eric Fry
P.S. to get The Daily Reckoning direct to your inbox sign up to our free e-mail newsletter or if you prefer to use RSS, subscribe to the Daily Reckoning RSS feed.
Related Articles:
Comment by Joe on 6 March 2012:
I must be a luddite because having been employed as an I.T developer for 30 years now (yes an old Mainframe die hard still writing new corporate code in Cobol) I do not believe that the next 'big' thing in I.T will be the cloud.
Name me one single multi Billion dollar company throughout the World that would entrust their very life blood to some upstart hosting company.
Simply based on the principles of scale, you cannot sue someone who is worth Millions for lost Billions, it can't be done.
No one has more of an appreciation of the value of your core services than yourself. Off-shoring has demonstrated a disconnect of priority and urgency. Legislating for service level agreements doesn't and can never truly reflect the values of a corporations dependency on its own business.
These are two plain and immutable facts why the cloud will never replace in-house core systems.
Some less important services might be hostable on the cloud. Let us be realistic and appreciate cloud services may well cater for consumer service or even neche business service where criticality does not come into the equation, but not core functionality.
Core functionality is the get-target for all the service providers because it is really where the money is, but, you only need one fold, one major infrastructure failure, or a full on hack/denial of service, and everyone will then appreciate the folly of not owning outright your own destiny.
Comment by Blogs on 6 March 2012:
Many old school companies will not change and this means in the long term their entire business model will be destroyed by new cloud based business.