The Holy Grail of Business Intelligence

With the recent Cloud Computing Test Bed announcement from Intel, HP and Yahoo!, the technology industry has snapped to attention. This initiative has been self described as a 'globally distributed internet-scale testing environment designed to encourage research on the software, data center management and hardware issues associated with cloud computing at a larger scale than ever before.'Framing this partnership as a research initiative speaks volumes to the current state of the market. Instead of running out the gate with a cloud solution, the premise of the Test Bed is to explore the possibilities and shortcomings of cloud computing. This type of large scale computing raises new, never before explored issues on storing and using data. Some of the objections and questions surrounding this shift were explored at the Evening in the Cloud at Enterprise 2.0 2008, where CXOs and cloud vendors sat down face-to-face to debate the impact of this new wave of technology.Shane Robison, Executive Vice President, Chief Strategy and Technology Officer at HP provided his take on 5 trends to watch in the cloud space. Specifically of interest were his observations surrounding enterprises and business intelligence.

HP Labs and their Everything as a Service strategy seeks to define how devices and services will interact, as well as how situation context will affect that interaction. Location, preferences, calendar and communities will all become more integral in the way next gen devices are impacting our lives, both personally and in business. Whatever the results of the Test Bed's research, I'm confident that we'll be much closer to a seamless device and service integration.