The internet really is full of stuff, and we are starting to fill the Clouds with all sorts of software that moves from the serverrooms and in to the clouds. One aspect here that is often missing is what a Cloud environment and the Internet in itself can add to what we already know and have. Or in other words, running in the cloud is not only about lowering costs, and if you look at it by lowering costs by running things in the cloud the same way you used to run it on your private server, then chances are you might not gain anything, running in a cloud is also about having distinct advantages not easily available somewhere else.

Christopher Ahlberg here at Recorded Future just blogged about another way of looking at it: What do we have access to on the internet that is not readily available in the Server room, and the answer is: data. A lot of data. For someone in the field of BI, not using Internet data, and sticking to traditional querterly results as the base for analysis, is really missing the point.

Read Christophers blog here for the full Monty (!). This is an interesting perspective, and way you look at it, and as an amateur computer historial, this is particularily interesting as one of the few commercial uses for the worlds probably only useful hydralic computer was just this: Using analysis to project sales. (This is actually largely true. Feel freee to ask me more on this last subject at the upcoming MySQL UC. This is truly weird geeky history!).

/Karlsson