Since emergence of tech giants like Yahoo, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, etc we have seen significant growth in communication over internet. Communication in the sense that people started to get access to whole lot of information with the basic internet connection. In last 20 years these tech giants have found several ways to have upper hand in every type of technological innovation. Its all started with search engines, news aggregations, email services. Around 2006, the time came for offering cloud services like docs where one can access, create, update spreadsheets and documents. Around the same time when Google introduced operating system for mobiles then picture became more clearer for future technology war among tech giants. Smartphones became significantly cheaper. Internet connections became more faster in countries where population is on higher side. All tech giants started focusing on to create an ecosystem to expand their reach to larger audience which ultimately made the world more connected which was never before.
Now, we are in the time where large amount of data is constantly developing and tech giants are using this data to generate intelligence out of it. An automatic chat bot is guiding us to make any transaction, AI based system beats Chinese game’s world champion, you are getting offers and ads based on your ‘digital’ habits, driverless cars has been developed and in testing, and there are lots of such kind of scenarios which are surprising us.
People call the large amount of data as ‘Big Data’. But I think rather calling it as a big data we can simply say the data generated by these organizations or any organization who will be willing to gather and store data of their customers will be big in size and there will be real time and continuous addition to it. The medium to collect data is definitely digital assets created by tech giants around people. It was smart phones earlier but now any human made electronic device or machinery is now connected to server and providing information to organizations. Generated data is what companies need to run AI algorithms on it, understand the analytics out of it and create an intelligent decision which is prediction to customers or organizations. Companies using analytics data to learn about customers, understand their behavior, liking, habits and then refining or introducing products which are up to the mark and have an edge over competition. This competition is reaching a new level each day now. In upcoming years stored data will be 163 Zettabytes till 2025, according to research firm IDC. This is 10 times more than we have in 2016. That means, by 2025 we will see more innovations and transformation in digital arena.
Cloud computing has played vital part for data to reach to servers and from servers to devices within less time. For a success to cloud computing, what it needs is an internet connection. When the device get sync up with network, data starts to push on server for processing. Seconds of time for this process makes it real time. Companies looking to take advantage of such better connectivity for real time predictive analysis and open door for next level of revolution in technologies with support from AI based techniques (Machine Learning, Deep Learning, etc). Also according to Gartner research firm, by 2020, there will be 20.4 billion connected things as compare to 8 billion in 2016. So, the ratio of amount of data generated and number of devices will be directly proportional to each other. Role of cloud computing and its services will become more crucial.
Also cloud computing will be going to expand to obtain AI capabilities and already started offering analytics services as well. In the recent VMworld, Pat Gelsinger, CEO of leading IT infrastructure solution provider VMware said the VMware is embracing cloud. VMware partnered with cloud giants like Google, AWS to enable organization to easily embrace multi-cloud strategy. Likewise there are multiple partnerships taken place around cloud within newly started companies and those which are already established.
When you talk about digital transformation, you imagine that companies are optimizing business processes. But its not true. Companies are innovating business models and integrating digital technologies with digital assets to use within business models to eliminate time and distance barriers in digital world. Everything is to collect and process data rapidly and make human life easier. Amount of data generated in past and data that will generate will be foundation of digital transformation in future.
