Thanksgiving, Pacemakers, and Cloud Computing

The St. Jude Medical Accent RF pacemaker with wireless monitoring

Happy Thanksgiving! I hope you had a great holiday celebrating the people, events, and things for which you are thankful.

My holiday began well, with my mom flying in to visit for a few days. However, on Thanksgiving morning, she fainted and we took her to a hospital for tests. She felt and seemed fine minutes after fainting, but she has a pacemaker, so there was additional cause for concern.

Pacemakers store data for configuration and for reporting. A technician interrogated the pacemaker, using a computer with sensors to review its configuration, test its performance, and gather data around the time my mom fainted. He reported that nothing was wrong with the pacemaker, its configuration, or its ability to interact with her heart.

I asked the technician if pacemakers would eventually be able to transmit data wirelessly at regular intervals or even in real time, so that a computer could monitor the data and automatically generate alerts when it detects a problem. “That’s the new technology,” he replied. This article, written last week for the Chicago Tribune, is about the new generation of pacemakers that provide wireless monitoring.

Wireless pacemakers are a good example of technology that continually improves to serve us better, faster, and cheaper. Cloud computing is another example; rather than taking months or years to implement, cloud-based solutions can be delivered in days or weeks with drastically reduced infrastructure and maintenance costs and requirements as compared to on-premises systems.

Consider these cloud-based solutions that can be implemented immediately to improve business performance, drive revenue growth and profitability, and solve IT concerns in the cloud:

Enterprise mashup dashboards such as mashmatrix Dashboard provide rapid, personalized development of dashboards from any web-facing data source; get a complete view of a customer or patient on one screen without having to switch between screens and applications.

SaaS business intelligence (BI) applications from Birst and eiVia provide quick reporting and predictive analytics for decision-making.

Enterprise relationship management solutions such as BranchIt help your business leverage relationships that colleagues may have with prospective customer or partner contacts.

Price optimization applications from companies such as Mimiran help you avoid leaving money on the table in pricing your products or services.

Enterprise cloud databases such as TrackVia help you quickly design and deploy cloud-based applications to solve business problems.

Integration products from Pervasive Software and Sesame Software provide data exchange and interoperability between legacy on-premises and software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications.

Cloud-based single sign-on systems from companies such as TriCipher provide a secure, single login for a user to access all authorized cloud-based applications.

My mom was released from the hospital in excellent condition late on Thanksgiving. The pacemaker optimizes her heart rate and improves her quality of life. I am very thankful for that.

Cloud computing can quickly help you optimize the way you run your business. If you start now, you will be thankful for it long before next Thanksgiving.

What types of business solutions and results would you like to see at your company before next Thanksgiving?