Lady Gaga and Cloud Computing

She’s everywhere. Like Madonna in the ‘80s, Lady Gaga is almost ubiquitous. She was on the Grammy Awards broadcast; on American Idol; she’s all over YouTube and in so many photos, magazine and television interviews; and, she’s on tour. Even I am writing about her in a cloud-computing blog.

Lady Gaga is among a new generation of pop artists who carry on a tradition of blending music, fashion, theatrical performances, and multimedia that blossomed with artists like Michael Jackson, Madonna, Queen, David Bowie, KISS, and Alice Cooper. You can see her on demand from anywhere, and she probably has a long career ahead.

She reminds me a lot of cloud computing: still new on the scene; gaining a lot of momentum and attention; a bit controversial; strong initial following and success; a bright future ahead; on demand from anywhere; and carrying on an earlier tradition. With cloud computing, that tradition is metered, pay-as-you-go computing where processing occurs on servers accessed by thin-client terminals.

Social media analysis of Lady Gaga - click to enlarge

Just to see if my comparison holds true, I performed a social-media analysis of Lady Gaga and cloud computing, using social media monitoring software as a service Attensity360. Not surprisingly, Lady Gaga trounces cloud computing in social media. Over the last 30 days, Lady Gaga was mentioned 232,958 times in social media. Her topic is gaining this month over last month, and Facebook leads the list of sources with 884 mentions. She is normally mentioned around 8,000 times per day, but, on April 30 and May 5, her mentions soared to 14,000.

Social media analysis of cloud computing - click to enlarge

In an earlier post, I did a social-media analysis of cloud computing, and found that the topic was declining in social media. Cloud computing only received 19,781 mentions in March, so cloud computing promoters like me have a lot of work to do to catch up to Lady Gaga! Actually, fewer mentions of a new and promising technology is a good thing; it means that cloud computing is now beginning to mature, just like Lady Gaga.

Gartner and cloud expert David Linthicum confirm that cloud computing is ending its initial peak of inquiry and thought leadership, and is now moving toward mainstream adoption. In this press release Gartner indicates that cloud computing has now reached its peak of inflated expectations and will enter mainstream adoption over the next two to five years. In this post, “The cloud computing hype is beginning to die,” David Linthicum noted a perceived decline in hype and information about cloud computing, which he thinks is “a good sign that cloud computing is about to enter the mature stage of actual usage.”

No company can afford to ignore social media and the insights that SaaS social media monitoring products like Attensity360 provide. With social media you have the largest focus group in history that you can monitor and engage. This video illustrates the staggering adoption of social media over the last several years.

There are stellar SaaS products that you can quickly implement to analyze, forecast, and improve your business performance and insights, such as:

• Enterprise mashup dashboards such as mashmatrix Dashboard provide rapid, personalized development of dashboards from any web-facing data source; get a complete view of all the information you need 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 brand management solutions from Attensity360 aggregate, measure, and analyze news media and consumer opinion from print and social-media sources to yield insights that enable sales, marketing, PR, and executives to better understand their customers, competitors, influencer communities, industry trends and issues, the press, and the investment community.
• 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.

Lady Gaga and cloud computing are on a similar trajectory, moving to wide adoption after their initial splash. I think Lady Gaga should cross another boundary and add a venture capital fund for cloud computing companies to her empire.