Information-as-a-Service Beats Cloud

We've all read or heard how the world is flat now, and it's no great surprise that organizations are struggling to be more responsive to their customers, more efficient in how they operate, and more agile in responding to the ever-changing market in this "flat" world. What might be somewhat of a surprise to many is that data is often one of the nasty culprits holding us back.  After all, our data has gotten highly fragmented, and as system complexity has increased so has the latency of data moving through it. It's hard to make the best decisions if you can't get all the data you need to operate on or the data that you do get is out of date. And let's not even mention what happens when the data is inconsistent!

Anyway, I recently spent a day with Forrester reviewing the state of the Information-as-a-Service market. In a nutshell, information-as-a-service is about getting the right data, in the right form, and at the right time so that the best operational decisions can be made. I've been a part of this market for 9+ years now but was absolutely struck by some recent survey data Forrester shared.

Basically, a balanced industry cross-section of 2K+ software decision makers were surveyed as to their organization's plans to implement a number of key initiatives and technologies. Typically pretty tame stuff. What popped out, though, was that in 2009 more organizations are implementing or planning to implement information-as-a-service than ESB's or cloud! This is significant given all the buzz about cloud and SaaS. More importantly, though, maybe one of those decision makers that was surveyed works for a competitors of yours!

Check out Forrester's "Information-As-A-Service: Delivering Real-Time Information Drives Market Toward The Mainstream" to learn more and stayed tuned right here for lots more on IaaS in the future!