Overview of Big Data The promise of Big Data is to drive profitability by reducing costs, improving product/service quality, decreasing time of delivery, optimizing product offerings and making smart business decisions in everything from medical treatments to social media campaigns, to customer service and marketing promotions. Big Data is a term used to describe data sets which break the capabilities of traditional IT as they demand massive storage requirements, huge transaction counts, big analytical needs, quick response times, and enormous bandwidth requirements. According to Gartner and IBM, Big Data is characterized by 4 Vs: volume (size of the data set), velocity (speed of data collection and analysis), variety (data formats), and veracity (quality of data)..

Internet of Things IoT is the next evolution of the internet taking a giant leap with its ability to extract, analyze and share data. RFIDs, microcontrollers and other sensor technologies back-track to the roots of IoT. These devices added up to only 50 million connected devices before the introduction of smartphones. Emergence of the ubiquitous devices – Smartphones, has exponentially increased the total number of connected devices and actually brought the IoT technology to reality. Today the sensor technologies are communicating via internet with other devices including smartphones, thus calling themselves as smart sensors, smart location devices, smart actuators etc. IoT is nothing but a network of these physical objects having embedded tools to interact, sense and communicate with their external environment or their internal statesGartner estimates by 2020 IoT will have around 26 billion units connected excluding the PCs, tablets and smartphones connected to the edge of the internet; today contributing to around 40% machine-generated data of the total data generated. IoT is an exciting development following the internet revolution; in which personal devices, physical objects communicate with each other to take autonomous actions based on intelligent decisions without human interactions. It encompasses information services, communication services, hardware and embedded software services associated with things. Market factors like lowering production costs for smart devices, general proliferation of devices like sensors, processors and its dropping costs have contributed to the low cost of adding IoT capabilities. And technical factors like more efficient wireless and wired communications, less data connection charges by the connectivity providers, expanded cellular networks leading to increased bandwidth and signaling are fueling the emergence of IoT technology to the point that connectivity will become a standard feature..

Cloud computing is spreading through enterprises as it enables the agility sought by global organizations. The rapid adoption of cloud computing can be attributed to a latent need in both the end user organizations as well as the IT industry for a delivery mechanism that is ubiquitous, scalable and elastic, with equally elastic expense outlays. Improved agility, reduced CAPEX and OPEX, faster time to market, among others, are just some of the business benefits experienced by the organizations moving to the cloud. Cloud computing has fundamentally altered the way software is delivered. Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) are focusing on how to position their products as a service. Before deciding to offer traditional license mode, pure Software as a Service (SaaS) mode, or a dual mode, the ISV must factor in product readiness considering the existing and prospective user base, as well as new investments that must be made to achieve the desired delivery mechanism. The ISV should also understand the competitive price points for the products offered through different delivery mechanisms, especially as compared with generally lower entry price points offered byproducts offered only as SaaS. It is also important to factor in investment for scalability in the SaaS model since customers expect on-demand additional resources during their peak consumption periods. To deliver Software as a Service (SaaS) ISVs typically work with either ready cloud services offered by Amazon, Microsoft, Google or Salesforce.com (force.com) or rent some data center space offered by infrastructure hosting companies. The available cloud services from vendors typically fall under the IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) and PaaS (Platform as a Service) offerings. On the product engineering side, the ISV has a choice of a variety of Cloud platforms. Some platforms offer built-in mechanisms for offering data as a service. Most platforms offer ready-made components for workflows, web-services, and transaction management. It is also commonplace to find support for services such as billing, monitoring, and management on these platforms. As the underlying Cloud technology evolves, the ISV will be confronted with more choices for technologies like metadata APIs, 4GL abstractions, and advanced subscription models. The ISV will also need to decide whether they should deploy applications on multiple platforms and whether they should offer their products through a marketplace provided by the platform provider. Xoriant and cloud computing Xoriant has worked with several ISV’s to either develop their cloud offerings or migrate their traditional offerings on the cloud. The migration has involved re-architecting their solutions to incorporate key cloud solution abilities like multi-tenancy, access from multiple devices and administration tools to monitoring/billing their customers via pay per use. Xoriant has implemented OpenStack Private Cloud for Cloud Monitoring which differs from pure virtualization and it is deployable and functional on any underlying IaaS cloud platform. Xoriant has worked with several ISV’s in terms of assessment of different technologies, platforms and applications in several different stages of their cloud maturity. Xoriant recognizes that the most effective ways of visualizing different cloud related technologies and IT environments is to model the cloud in terms of a broad and comprehensive framework..