The Universe and the Digital Universe are Expanding into Clouds

History of the Universe - click to expand

I’ve been watching two excellent series on the Discovery Channel: Into the Universe with Stephen Hawking, and Life with Oprah Winfrey. They complement each other very well and do a great job explaining our current understanding of the universe and the various categories of life on Earth. I was reminded that the universe is 14 billion years old and probably has a life span of 28 billion years ahead. That will give us plenty of time to figure out what to do with all the data we’re creating. The universe is expanding and so is our love affair with creating and disseminating data.

History of the Universe

According to an EMC-sponsored IDC study published yesterday, “The Digital Universe Decade – Are You Ready?” the digital universe is expanding at an almost unimaginable rate. That may be no surprise, but consider these statistics compiled from: the news release announcing the study; the EMC Digital Universe page; and the multimedia presentation of the study:

• The creation and replication of new digital information set a record in 2009 by growing to 800 billion gigabytes, 62 percent over 2008. Try to picture a stack of DVDs reaching 240,000 miles to the Moon and back.
• The amount of digital information created in 2010 is projected to be 1.2 zettabytes (a zettabyte is a trillion gigabytes). That equals 707 trillion copies of the more than 2,000-page U.S. Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act signed into Law in March 2010. Stacked end to end, the documents would stretch from Earth to Pluto and back 16 times or cover every inch of the United States in paper 3 feet deep. The distance between Earth and Pluto is between 2.6 billion and 4.6 billion miles, depending on where Earth and Pluto are in their respective orbits.
• The expansion of the digital universe is expected to gain further momentum over the next decade, increasing 44-fold to 35 trillion gigabytes (35 zettabytes) by the year 2020. Our stack of DVDs would now reach halfway to Mars. That’s between 17 million and 125 million miles, depending on where Earth and Mars are in their respective orbits.

The view from Earth; click on image to enlarge it.

I think it’s clear that the expanding digital universe can only be managed in the cloud, with its elastic ability to rapidly scale to meet varying levels of demand. Here’s a good piece of information for cloud computing vendors from the study:

• Based on the use of cloud computing services by companies to reduce the portion of their IT budget devoted to legacy system maintenance, IDC estimates that the increase in IT dollars spent on innovation could drive more than $1 trillion in increased business revenues between now and the end of 2014. This projection will increase substantially as private cloud and other cloud computing models move into mainstream adoption.

If you are a vendor that could benefit from the $1 trillion that IDC estimates will expand into cloud computing by 2014, you may want to examine your pricing strategy. Price optimization ensures that you are pricing your products appropriately for each of your customer segments. Price optimization SaaS solution Mimiran was just profiled by Inc.magazine as one of four killer sales apps that could help you succeed in monetizing the expanding digital universe.

Consider these scalable cloud-based systems that are very capable of managing and interpreting the increasing amount of data that your organization will create and access during this decade of the rapidly expanding digital universe:

• 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.

Universe collage - click to enlarge

How do you plan to manage your expanding digital universe with cloud-based systems?