The Right Information At the Right Time

I live in New York City, and I was up on the roof of my building this evening staring over at the 59^th Street Bridge hoping to get a glimpse of the filming of the Dark Knight Rises that’s currently taking place there.  I wasn’t fortunate enough to get a glimpse of Batman like I’d hoped, but the fact that I had the opportunity to try again says something about the power of the cloud (in general) and social media (specifically).

Imagine the value of getting the right information at the right time.  For me, this evening, it meant being aware of a movie that was filming nearby.  As silly as it may sound, I would’ve been disappointed to learn about the Dark Knight Rises had been filming so close to my apartment if I’d learned about it after the fact.

Now imagine if the information was truly valuable.  The right information (even a little bit) is potentially worth infinitely more before an event, than all of the information after the fact.  In my case, learning too late that another truly awful traffic weekend had been caused by the Batman would’ve likely only added to my frustration if I'd missed the chance to see him entirely.  Instead, knowing what was occurring gave me the opportunity to see Batman in person (a potential thrill) and adjust my behavior (by staying off the roads and as far away from the affected intersections as possible).

Again, my example is silly and simple, but the value of having the right information at the right time in invaluable for businesses.

We’re all likely to have flown commercial flights and experienced the frustrating reality of getting somewhere without your luggage.  Chances are that you didn’t even know your luggage missed your flight until well after you’ve watched everyone else collect their bags from the carrousel.  Would your frustration over your lost luggage have been lessened if the wait had been shorter or nonexistent?

If you think about it, in this post-9/11 world, there’s absolutely no chance that your luggage is going to take a flight without you.  If you fail to board your flight, your bags are going to be pulled.  Thinking about this another way, somewhere there’s already a link between the passenger and their suitcase.  Why can’t this information be used to enhance the customer experience?

The obvious answer is that it should be.  It’s a matter of doing something with the right information at the right time.

I’ll be the first person to admit that this scenario is a business intelligence problem and not necessarily a cloud problem… I’m saying “not necessarily” because the volatility of demand for computational resources for business intelligence problems can lend itself very readily to a cloud solution… but the point that I’m trying to make is that there’s value to having the right information at the right time.  Waiting to receive bad news only seems to make the news worse.

In this situation the “right” information is readily recognizable—it’s the passenger who’s going to find his luggage didn’t make his flight—but in many business situations, information needs to be analyzed first.  These types of problems are ready for cloud solutions.

When I joined DataSynapse, one of the first customers I spent a good deal of time with was an insurance giant.  The value of our product to this customer was the ability to harness the unused compute capacity of all of the machines in their environment.  They’d crunch through their scenarios to try and determine their best price models… but the problem they had in a pre-cloud world they had to make certain concessions to get their work done on time.

(I apologize for the vagueness of this… I’m trying to keep a former customer and their operations confidential)

Enter the cloud!

We set up a private cloud and all of a sudden there was more compute capacity than they could’ve imagined—and not just in their data centers either.  If you think about all of the computers that are out there in a large enterprise, very few of them are used to their full capacity—there’s a lot of unused compute cycles that are simply wasted unless they’re somehow consumed.

DR resources?  You almost hope they’re doing nothing (meaning there’s not a disaster that’s forcing them into action).  Why not give them the ability to join the cloud—do work—and leave the cloud as soon as they need to do something else.  The same can be said for the resources on most everyone’s desktop—the typical PC has gotten far more powerful over the years, and there’s very little that you’re going to do to take full advantage of its power—especially after business hours or on weekends.  These are simply more resources that can be made available to the cloud thereby raising their utilization and lowering the cost of ownership.

In the case of my unnamed customer, with their new cloud, they suddenly had far more capacity than they’d previously realized, and now they were able to take advantage of all of it.

As it was explained to me in one of the program manager's own words, in their pre-grid (this was before “cloud” was the appropriate term) environment they knew they were facing a down year if two major hurricanes hit the state of Florida.  The first year this customer used their new cloud resources, there happened to be five major hurricanes, but because of all of the additional processing the customer was able to do beforehand, it turned out to be one of their most profitable years ever.  The value of the cloud was proven to this customer almost immediately.

In short, they were able to be more responsive and do more with the resources they already had.  More compute power allowed for more data to be processed and more effective pricing models to be determined.  It may have been a bad year for Florida, but it was a great year for this particular customer.  Eventually it benefited the same hurricane victims as well, because the customer was more readily equipped to address the demands of the market… it’s amazing what having access to the right data at the right time can do.